Here is New York
Charles Traub
Traub: This
is going to be very informal, because it’s my nature, and because
you want it that way. So,
where are you all from? Everywhere?
Audience: Texas. Rochester. Ohio. Atlanta. Buffalo. Illinois. Alaska. Michigan. Boston. Baltimore. Colorado. Vegas.
Traub: Welcome. You’re
all very fortunate to be a part of this Institute. I’ve known about it and been involved with it since
its inception, more or less, in one way or another. It’s a kind of unique opportunity to come together,
not only as a diverse group of people, but as aspiring creative beings
in the world, and for many of you to be exposed to New York in a
way that you probably wouldn’t get exposure in other ways. Those of us in New York like to think of New York as the center
of the world, though we know there’s another world out there,
but what makes New York the center of the world is that people come
here from everywhere, and there’s no such thing as a New Yorker
anymore.
Cheryl
invited me to participate in this, not only, I think, as a photographer
and educator, but more importantly at this moment, because I am one
of the co-founders of something called Here is New York. How many have seen it, by chance, or
know what it is? One
person? Oh, a couple more. How many of you know what the dates of
WWI are? How many don’t
know the exact dates of WWI? Raise
your hand. All of you
are artists and dealing with contemporary issues, how do you place
modernism if you don’t know when WWI is? Most
of you are not historical. That’s
problematic. That’s
my first chiding issue to you. You
say, well, daytime porn, I’m an artist. It’s
not true. You need to
know what World War I was, how it situated itself and how it created
the first world-wide disaster. And
if you can’t locate the dates, then you really can’t
locate the dates of modernism. If
you can’t locate the dates of modernism, you’re not quite
focused about what you’re doing as a creative artist in the
21st century, in the post-modern era. I’m
just saying that because you’re the best and brightest in many
cases here, but your history is weak, and you can’t function
as an artist in a world that doesn’t encompass what the world
is really about historically. Anyway, I pulled that on my graduate
students last fall and I was shocked, I found there was only one
person that got it absolutely right. It
is 1914 to what? 1918. How many years with the United States
involved in World War I? Which
years? The last three
years, you’re correct. You’re
a foreigner, also, aren’t you. So
she knows it and some of you don’t know it. Where are you from originally?
Audience: (unintelligible)
Traub: Uh-huh. See? Interesting. Anyway. Enough
of that kind of lecturing, but I just wanted to make a point. What his project is about is history
itself, and this will be a date, 9/11/01, that I think few people
will every forget. For
good and for bad. It probably will be the key moment in
the new history of the world, hard to predict what that will be exactly,
but certainly the world changed from that day on. My son is 30, some of you are about that age, and I stood
and watched the buildings fall with him in the middle of University
Place, looking through Washington Square, and I looked at him and
said, “You know, you’re life is going to be completely
changed from here on after,” and, of course, it has been. For most of you in ways uncounted. In response to that, my students felt the same way. A group of people more or less like you
all, and they sort of were stunned that day, as everybody was, and
assembled with one of their teachers and sort of just stopped and
watched TV, and then several came to me and said, “We have
to do something. We have to react. We have to get involved somehow,” and
some went down to photograph; some did other things, but all of us
agreed that we needed to sit and find out what was going on in the
world, because it was so immediate, and then proceed in discussing
what roles we could play. Out of that, at the same time, I was
called by Gilles Peress and Michael Shulan, all of these are prominent
photographic people, some you know but some of you don’t; some
are more behind the scenes. But
nevertheless, they said, “We want to do something. Michael has an empty storefront and he
has this idea about maybe putting up some pictures from students
and other teachers,” so we met around a table at the School
for Visual Arts on the 14th or 16th and by
the 24th of September we had a show up, in SoHo, which
was the beginning of what is now called Here is New York,
which was a response to the 9/11 crisis. Students
of SVA organized the scanning, the digitization of imagery, the network,
the school lent equipment, one student came up with the title Here
is New York. Does anybody know where that comes from? No? E. B. White wrote an essay about New York called Here is
New York in 1947 which is considered to be one of the best, if
not thee best, general description of what New York is. And
in it there’s a kind of prophetic paragraph that describes
the possibility of all of it coming to an end when a flock of airplanes
fly over and hits buildings. This
essay, by the way, is available in any good bookstore. It’s
a thin book. A student
mentioned, had we read it, and we said no, or at least we didn’t
remember having read it, and he quoted it, and that was immediately
the title. Here is
New York referring almost to Here is Anything. Here
is New York; here is Berlin; here is wherever. So that New York’s experience could
be shared with the world, and was shared by the world. So the name stuck and we put the quote
up in the gallery and we made a simple call for images from anybody
and everybody--photographers, professionals, we call a lot of the
professionals, and in the show are many of the most famous images
that you have seen of 9/11, from Magnum photographers, New York Times
photographers, great and well-known artists, but also pictures from
students, artists unknown, from fireman, policeman, school girls,
school boys, stockbrokers, lawyers, street cleaners, whatever. And
we decided to create something called A Democracy of Photography. We made no advertisement. We put a little note on the web. We called some photographers, and we opened the door at 116
Prince. You are all
invited down there and encouraged to come see the show. I was hoping we could organize this down there today, I wish
that we could have, and taken you through it personally. In the space of 116 Prince and its adjacent
space hangs approximately 1,000 pictures. Those pictures were more taken by amateurs and untrained people
than by trained people. They
hang on wires and paper clips or binder clips. Can you bring the website up? They’re all printed the same
way. They’re all
printed as digital prints. They’re
scanned digitally, and every print is reduced, if you will, to the
same common denominator. www.hereisnewyork.org. There hang 1,000 pictures. In our databank today we have 8,000 images
taken by everybody imaginable, and we’re getting 10,000 more
from the Pentagon disaster, and additional images from Pennsylvania. That picture kind of shows you how they’re
hung in the gallery. I’m
going to just let you randomly look through it.
This website
was built by SVA students, and others, also some highly professional
people, as well, including my son who is a professional web archetype,
and it was produced and pretty much up and running in less than three
weeks. To date, this web site has had 240 million
hits. Meaning that it
is one of the more active websites in the country, in the world. It has 1.25 million to 1.5 million every
day. You can click on
and buy any of these pictures. All
pictures sell for the same price--$25. The
net proceeds to go a venerable charity called The Children’s
Aid Society of New York, and they have a special fund called The
WTC 9/11 fund, for the poorest victims of the tragedy; food service
workers, elevator operators, people like that. Not
stockbrokers or fireman and policeman. Anyone
know what the connection of the Children’s Aid Society is to
photography? I wouldn’t
expect you really to know, but I’m just curious. Louis Hind children’s photographs
were done for the Children’s Aid Society and commissioned by
them. It is a 150 year old agency, which supports
indigent children. So
we picked it because we thought it was universal, and we knew it
was venerable, and we knew the money would go where it was supposed
to go.
A flood
of images came in just immediately, and they kept growing and growing
and growing. We thought we were going to be open two
weeks, and maybe raise $25,000 for charity. To date, I think we’ve been opened since September 24,
and we are very much still open, and we’ve raised over a million
dollars for charity, and some operating expenses came out of that. The show in one form or another will
be in probably 12 major cities around the world for the 9/11 anniversary,
if you want to use that word. It
will be in Rome, Moscow, Paris, London, L.A., Washington DC, Tampa,
Louisville, Kentucky, Stockholm, Tokyo, etc. Some
version of at least 300-500 images each, and in Washington, 1,500
pictures, and there will be a huge projection, very likely, that
indicates some of the sites on the ellipse in Washington, DC, for
the 9/11 anniversary, and maybe also here in New York, down at ground
zero. This show will
be the most witnessed and viewed show in all of history. That’s
quite an astounding claim, but it is true. Even
to date, it probably is. A
million people have gone to through gallery now, the web site’s
been visited somewhere between 30-40 million people, we don’t
know how many people those actual hits are, exactly, and by the time
it is in all these cities, it will far outstrip any show in history. And by the way, it will be in these cities simultaneously,
thanks to digital technology. It
is, of course, the most witnessed event in history. It is the most photographed event in history, and therefore,
people seem to keep coming back to it in order to, if you will, sort
of verify what they think they saw or what they think they know,
and maybe to verify what they don’t know, and to find out they
don’t really and cannot comprehend it ultimately.
Younger: Can
I ask a question?
Traub: Sure. Anybody
interrupt me, anytime.
Younger: When
Giuliani put the ban on photographing, what role did that play in
what you were doing?
Traub: I
don’t think it played any role in what we were doing. I think plenty of people were photographing
from buildings, a lot of people live downtown, as those of you know
who know the city that downtown is not just a commercial business
area, it’s also a residential area. A
lot of pictures had already been taken. My own view of that ban was that it was wrong. My significant other lives on Duane Street,
which is six blocks from ground zero, and her place was covered with
dust and the street was really a mess, and I was photographing down
there on the next day, and by the 3rd, 4th or
5th day, the city--how many of you were in the city for
9/11?--it’s hard to describe, and if you don’t know the
city it’s even harder, but from 13th Street down
was a military zone essentially. You had to show identification to go in and from Canal Street,
further down, it was even tighter. So you had to go in with caution, in a sense, after the first
couple of days. The
first couple of days it was chaos, or at least the first 24 hours. Anybody could go in; lots of people went
in and made incredible pictures. By
the first week, there was a steady traffic of tourists and photographers
and anybody going down to look and get as close as they could to
ground zero. The furthest
they could go was, I think, Chamber Street, which was one block south
of where I live. You could see quite a bit, but not really
the pit, so to speak. I
remember neighbors and people being aghast at all these people trundling
down there. I felt,
on the other hand, that everybody deserved that right. That
in fact, it was necessary to comprehend this. If you lived in the city, or anywhere
else for that matter, to want to see that. It wasn’t gawking. The New York Times used that word, I remember. It was really a bad word to use, and
it wasn’t fair. I
think everybody who was at all sensitive and wanted to comprehend
this event, needed to see it and get as close to it as possible. Otherwise, it was like having a missing body from a loved
one. You needed to understand
what was left there. I
have two friends coming from Kentucky, where I’m from originally,
this weekend, and they came in and they trundled down to ground zero,
there’s nothing there now; it’s like a construction site. If
you haven’t been down there, you need to go down there, and
then go to the show. I
guess what their impression was, you know, it looked like a construction
site, but it was all the more remarkable when you know what had been
there and what was not there now, and what had, in fact been cleared
away. Then they came to the show, and their remarks to me were, “My
God! We had no idea
it was like this,” because if you didn’t see it, and
all you saw was the filtration presented to you by the media, by
CNN or the New York Times or Time Magazine or whatever and the same
basic loops over and over again, you had no idea of the various angles,
the various levels of disaster, suffering, heroic behavior, we like
to use the word of courage rather than hero, it’s gotten to
be a little bit too sacred, and the level of community which this
event created. So I
urge all of you who you think you may have seen enough of this, and
I understand that feeling as well, that you really haven’t. You
really haven’t experienced it if you have not been to ground
zero and I would urge you to see the show. There are 5,000 images on this website, so you can’t
go through it one by one. The
website, one picture at a time, can’t give it to you either. By the way, you can zoom in on these,
I don’t know if you’re aware of that, but there’s
a mechanism for zooming in on it. There
will also be on this website, more intellectual material, or what
I call content material, as it grows. It
will have a whole history of worldwide disasters from the beginning
of time. From Saddam and Gomorra or whatever,
from Pompeii to hurricanes to disasters to the bombing of Dresden
and Hiroshima and so on and so forth, and you’ll be able to
click on pictures from those, or representations of those events,
and find out histories about them and other kinds of urban, worldwide,
disasters.
The affect
of this show is that it takes, in a way, photography to some kind
of new position – some kind of position that is inherent in
the medium and which, in my mind, has been lost by the preciousness
of the gallery world and the commodity that photography has become,
and lost, if you will, by a certain kind of ego that has taken over
our medium, and returns it back to the very nature of what photography
is about in terms of its witness to the real world, and that it is
a medium that can be duplicated and replicated more so now that it’s
digital, and it is a medium that basically anybody and everybody
can partake in, in one way or another, and that historically, as
soon as the Brownie camera came out, that became more or less true. In
addition, it can be moved and interacted upon and related to by huge
masses of people, which really gives photography tremendous value,
when it is put back in the hands of the people who makes pictures. That means everybody, not just an elite
like yourselves, and you are an elite. But
back in the hands of a populace that has something to say about what
it is they undergo and experience day in and day out in the world. It’s unfortunate that we have lost
that, naturally, and unnaturally in some ways, to a process of a
great control put upon the medium by so-called authorities. They could either be newspaper editors, magazine editors,
galleryists, teachers, or what have you. In
a forum as we have created, you have about as open a possibility
as possible to submit images. We
rejected no one’s images. Only
after we had been up several months did we start sort of filtering
a little bit, because if we got another picture of another burning
building from an angle that we already had, it was just getting so
redundant and also impossible for us to store it all. But
the principal is that if one picture tells a story, a thousand pictures
tells a thousand stories, and tells a single story from many different
points of view and angles. We
all know, and particularly those who are a little older than you,
we’ve experienced this in our world of photography, I’ve
been in photography teaching and photographing for 32 years now,
that any picture, no matter who took it, where it was taken, or what
it is of, ultimately becomes of some value, at least in the historical
sense, when it is put into appropriate context. Every
picture, every photograph, has some modicum of information, some
modicum of fact, some modicum of detail that gives it meaning and
value from a perspective removed from the point in which it was taken. Any
of you who look at 19th century pictures and vernacular
pictures particularly, pictures that were taken in the landscape
or of institutions or buildings, realize how wonderful they are and
how important they are in that many cases they reveal things that
we would not have seen in the normal course of looking at the so-called
giants of the history of photography. So what’s going to happen here
with this collection, which will be probably the most significant
single collection it is, of any event ever recorded and ever assembled,
will become something like the Farm Security Administration’s
photographs, though larger. The
picture that will tell the story might be that one 100 years from
now. It might have something to do with sight or how they bandaged
people in the year 2001, or the fact that they were wearing these
masks trying to protect themselves from something they couldn’t
protect themselves from. You
can’t tell which of these pictures will be the icon of an event
as monstrous as this one was, and as powerful. So
collectively, they are greater than the sum of their parts. They are a synergistic experience, and
most of us know, those of us who pursue the fine arts of photography
or any form of the fine arts, know that the single picture is not
necessarily the statement of an artist. The
single picture gets separated out, if you will, as an icon, as a
kind of statement of a whole, but usually it doesn’t say as
much as the entire show or collection or book or whatever. Far
too many photographers are noted for few pictures rather than for
the body of work, and the body of work tells the story, and also
the great test of a great photographer is his or her ability to move
from one body to the next--to move on, and to produce multiple bodies
of work. But at any rate, this is not about individuals.
This is not about Joe Blow Famous Photographer, Mark Focus, the greatest
photographer who ever lived, or Susan who is the wonderful fashion
photographer who is a celebrity darling, or whatever. This is a picture of you by a democracy of image-making, by
ordinary people looking at a community experience in a community
way. We put no names on these pictures if
you noticed. Even in
the hanging of them, there are no names. They
are on the back for certain copyright reasons, but you cannot easily
view who took the picture. We’re
not interested in celebrating Joe Magnum. We’re interested
in a public witness to a public event. So
the democratic idea is very important.
Now a
lot of you are saying, well, okay, this 9/11 thing, this is this
wonderful American tragedy, and it’s being propagated as we’re
the victim and blah, blah, blah, but what about the world view? 2,500 people die every day in the Congo, I don’t know
if you’re aware of that, but it’s true, and there are
disasters that are killing people far greater than this one that
have happened throughout history, as our website will ultimately
review. So what about that? What
did we learn about all that? What
did we learn about our responsibility to the world from this? These are big questions, and I’m
not diminishing the nature of our own tragedy, nor am I trying to
blame the victims, but we do have a responsibility in this in terms
of our world view. I
think what this show has done, and I can’t document this in
any specific way, unless we start talking to people who were involved,
and we’ll show you some clips of that in a minute, is that
when people come to it, it doesn’t produce anger. It
produces a lot of sorrow--an amazing amount of sorrow. Then
it produces a sort of discussion, if you will, from a fireman talking
to an artist. A Lithuanian
talking to a Sudanese. A
fireman talking to a policeman. Whatever. The gallery was filled with people, day
in and day out, about 3,000-4,000 a day from September 24 well into
Christmas, people lining up around the block to get in, and that
included politicians, presidents, and celebrities and movie stars,
who all waited in line patiently, sometimes as much as an hour or
an hour and a half. What happens is there’s a dialog that opens up. And that dialog generally has been about
what is tragedy? What
is suffering? What is
community? Not about, “I hate this guy, he
hates me,” blah, blah, blah. And
my feeling is, on a very personal level, in talking with people and
seeing what’s happened and talking to people with all kinds
of backgrounds, is that they are more empathetic, more concerned
about what caused this and the world view than ever before. And
I think that’s the power, the great power, of the show, is
that it isn’t just New York’s tragedy, it’s a tragedy
representative of all tragedies of these kinds of dimensions all
over the world. We hope
that Here is New York will be come something like Here
is . . . , that if we had money and support and the energies
and so on and so forth, we would have a gallery open right now in
Jerusalem which would have pictures coming into it from Israelis
and Palestinians and U.N. people, Americans, and whoever was witnessing
what is going on there. Our point is not to be political, though. We are not here to take a side or to
be an ideological force except for the issue of the so-called democracy
of witness here. So
we hope that as we get beyond 9/11, the anniversary, and we have
these shows in 12 cities, that we will have established some kind
of network, if you will, to be able to empower others to react and
maybe put a small show up of their own about some community event
or it might be a neighborhood event or it might be a very big thing
to, if you will, circumvent the normal and conventional networks
of display and dissemination of information. So
let me stop for a minute and field a few questions. Let’s move around the website beyond the pictures a
little bit. There are
some other categories like “Contact Us.” I’m
looking for some gallery installation shots, have you seen any of
those? “Sales
Info.” What’s
the next one? Keep looking. Go to “Gallery”, the red
Gallery. Just surf.
Audience: I
was noticing before as they were clicking through the images, that
under “Victims” there was 176 images and under “Memorials” there
were 591 images. I’m a New Yorker, I lived here and I lived through it
and I was down there the second day but couldn’t get back down
there the second week, so I’ve had that experience. I got to a point where I started to worry about the fact that
we were just memorializing this thing to death and turning it into
some kind of complete political statement, you know, America and
America’s values and all that stuff, and there really isn’t
an America anymore. I
mean, America is made up of a whole bunch of people from foreign
countries, and I’m going to say something that people are not
too keen on, but it’s like trying to watch the World Cup, you
know? If America is
not in it, you’re not going to get in on television, you’ll
get it on the Spanish channel. Like in a way, we were just playing it to death.
Traub: I
don’t disagree with you. I
was trying to actually lead us to that question, I’m glad you
asked it. I think there’s
been a tremendous amount of playing it to death, and we have been
criticized, in fact a very well-known critic, a good friend of mine,
said, “Well, you’re propagating this jingoistic thing.” I countered with, I think it’s
one thing when one photographer does a show and it travels around
the world and it’s just one view. I
think it’s a very different issue than a kind of democratic
attempt that this is. And
as I tried to explain, I think that the real value in this is ultimately
being able to establish something more permanent that allows others
to use this as a model, not to, I mean we have no intention except
that it may be encased someway, in a memorial, down at ground zero,
which there should be a memorial there, no one doubts that. But
that this view of American suffering goes on forever and ever, as
if no one else in the world suffered is absolutely right. Oddly
though, and this is what’s peculiar in the world’s response
to this, we have done nothing to promote this show, and we have had
calls from day one literally from Minsk to Keokuk, Iowa, to put this
show. If we had money, resources and support,
we could put this show up in a hundred cities tomorrow. So all these shows are requested, not
by us, not pushed by us, but by institutions, individuals and people
in foreign countries, which is very interesting. Now
we can speculate on why that is. I think that the reason is that the world, in some way, wants
to know that we suffer too. This
is the first time we have ever suffered the way other cultures have
suffered from disasters. The
event is so unique in some ways, as a single catastrophe, and unprovoked
in the immediate sense, so I would throw the question back at you. The question is why would people want
to see this? Why did
they come in record crowds? We’ve
already experienced this, and in Berlin they want the show up in
five different cities in Germany, and it’s going up on the
4th of July. Not by the American institution, by the
way, it has nothing to do with American sponsorship. German government and German arts groups. I think that the underlying experience,
and I think you will have a sense of community that you haven’t
had a sense of. That
this isn’t just about New York. This
isn’t about America, really. But
I think as a culture we have to be culture that using words that
are self-serving, “hero,” and all those kinds of words,
which have just been bantered around too much. On
the other hand, there are, and I never knew a fireman in my life
before except maybe when I was a kid and visited the fire station,
I have met fireman and EMS workers and doctors and people who are
really remarkably worldly, thoughtful, concerned people about bigger
things other than what they experienced down there. And
I am very proud of them, and proud of the way this city has a universal
city of multi-groups of people, and by the way many people suffered
from very different backgrounds in those buildings, came together
and generally have behaved. Generally. I’m not saying there hasn’t been hideous incidents
and racist incidents and some backlash, but very little, relatively
speaking. It’s
way out of proportion to the general humanity of this city and of
the country in general. I
have some intellectual Italian friends who say, ah, how terrible
our government is, blah, blah, blah. Of
course, my politics are not particularly in favor of our current
government, but, but this Italian guy is saying to me, “You
guys can’t get anything done. . . .,” and I’m saying, “My
God! Anti-Semitism is
raging in Italy and France and you have a damn fascist for a minister
who won’t even allow freedom of press.” He says, “Well that doesn’t
matter--we’re just a small country.” And I say, “all the more then, it matters!” You can’t control it in a small
country. We’re
a big, multi-cultural country with all kinds of diversity and while
we have our good inequities, at this moment we haven’t behaved
too terribly. I’m not saying our foreign policy
is right and those kinds of things, but don’t beat ourselves
up. My feeling is to use it in the positive
sense. To learn.
Younger: I
just want to go back to one thing. This guys’ picture was all over the city. When I did my movie I must have filmed
it 12 times. He was
everywhere.
Traub: Yeah. I
don’t know anything about him, do you?
Younger: No. I
want to find out who he is.
Because
he was there more than anybody else I saw. There
must have been 5,000 of those.
Traub: What
other questions? Let’s
move forward. I’m
not dismissing your question. Please. I’m
very sensitive to it, empathetic to it, and concerned about it. I’m
concerned that this doesn’t become a vehicle of self-promotion
for America. Whatever America is.
Audience: Relating
to that question, I was wondering, you do this, having this exhibition
worldwide, and you have the best of intentions because these countries
invite you to show them, but do you think our government or our media
will use this opportunity to again use them as propaganda in promoting
this America-centric kind of presence.
Traub: I
suppose that inevitably that happens to some degree. And I can’t control that particularly. We were approached, by the way, by the
State Department who wanted to put it in 15 cities around the world,
and we turned them down. We
didn’t want to be a part of that and to get politicized. I should tell you, and I haven’t quite explained, we
do have a component of this that is now up downtown called History
Unframed. We have
made a call, give us your pictures, and you’re all invited
by the way to do this, and I meant to bring up a sheet about that,
to submit pictures about your view of the world, I underline the
word “world,” in the aftermath of 9/11. How has the world changed? How has the world not changed? How are people different? How are people reacting? How are people exploited or not exploited? It can be anywhere in the world. We have to date probably 500 pictures
of that nature which we are also displaying and we will continue
to display, and display alongside of these pictures, and we hope
that that archive will grow. We’re going to make an international
call on that level. So you’re all invited to submit pictures of your view
of the world now, and I encourage you as a group and as individuals
to do that. We have
pictures from Afghanistan, we have pictures from Israel, we have
pictures from Palestine, we have pictures from the Congo, we have
a lot of interesting pictures. What they add up to yet, I can’t
tell you. We don’t
know yet. It’s
not our point to have a preconceived notion or edit, but rather to
collect and see what it looks like and go from there.
Younger: Charles,
what about the gallery that’s across from ICP?
Traub: That’s
down now. That was that. That
gallery was called History Unframed, and that’s how
we started to collect those pictures. It’s simply down because we lost
the space and we didn’t have the manpower or womanpower to
keep it going, and that was problematic, and it was very successful. It took the show to a whole different populace of the city,
and it was quite remarkably also. But
the pictures we have from that are now forming the core of what we
call History Unframed. None of which, well there may be some
up here now, I don’t know.
Let’s
look at the other menu. Isn’t
there a Table of Contents? Okay,
let’s play one. I
may have picked up the wrong CD. I
think this is a bad CD. Go
to another one; another person.
(Playing
of a video/audio)
Go on
to another one. Put
him on. He’s a fireman. Let’s hear what he says. These are part of a collection that will
be eventually 500 people talking. We
call this Voices. We built a little self-activated booth
at 42nd Street, and we’re going to put it up downtown,
too, you can come in, make an appointment. You
activate it, you say what you want to say. No questions are asked, and you can start it or stop it whenever
you want. People signed
up, mostly what we called for were people who were down there photographing,
photographers, and people who are in pictures, to come in and to
say whatever they want to say. Psychologists
and many people from the social sciences and the public health group,
are very interested in this process because there is something healing
in this, and some people went through many, many terrors. Again,
there’s a model for other such kinds of things. Somebody may raise the question, well,
you know, this is all fancy stuff, this is a rich country, we can
do this, put this together, blah, blah, blah. Actually,
it’s not true. This
costs very little to do. We
raised a million dollars on nothing, by the way, on the donations
of people--not donations. Purchased
at $25 per picture, so practically everybody and anybody could afford
those pictures. The
equipment is pretty standard photographic and digital equipment. Most of it was done on old G3s, six to seven-year-old G3s,
and very simple scanners, and it speaks, by the way, to the democracy
that is inherent in this new technology of the digital world, when
it’s used right and doesn’t get in the hands of the controlling
powers. Of course, every democracy has its weaknesses. There
are people who have to take control. There
are people who have to be in charge sometimes, and we have that. But by and large, the people who came
to work at this institution all have a voice, there have been over
250 volunteers involved in Here is New York from all walks
of life and all backgrounds imaginable. The technology is readily available,
it’s not terribly complicated, it could go up anywhere, just
like we did, practically anywhere in the world. Gilles
Peress came back from Kabul two weeks after warfare started there
and he said that on the borders there, there were cyber café’s
opening like that. It’s
not that they don’t have reach, to some degree, into the new
technology. In fact, the new technology is empowering,
in a way, to those people who have eventually been marginalized to
act, and to circumvent the normal communication systems.
Audience: I
just want to ask about that because I think that’s almost problematic
in saying that all Americans or New Yorkers are illiterate. And they speak English. So how do those communities access these
things?
Traub: Well,
the possibility of coming to this show is pretty much available to
anyone. Of course there
are communities and people who don’t get out of their communities,
but if you’re illiterate in the world you have a real problem,
and the world has a responsibility to that, but the responsibility
to the illiterate people of the world is not even this. The
responsibility to the illiterate people of the developed world is
to make them non-illiterate. In
other words, you can’t hold up technology which has the possibility
of making people literate. The
point there is education. It’s
a different problem. I
don’t think you can’t criticize one for the other.
Audience: Then
can you speak about how would someone of a different language. .
. .
Traub: Who
said it had to be . . .
Audience: .
. . I’m just asking because I didn’t understand that.
Traub: It
doesn’t have to be in English. You can do this in Sweden or Stockholm or wherever you want
to do it. It’s
not the issue that it’s English.
Audience: That’s
not what I’m asking. I’m asking, in these video recording sessions.
Traub: Oh,
you can do it in your own language.
Audience: It
is encouraged?
Traub: Oh,
yeah, anybody can speak in any voice you want. I’m sorry, I didn’t understand
your question. You can
speak in any voice you want, in any manner you want. We do no filtering of it, and some of these things go on--the
only thing we have is an hour maximum, and you can speak for 15 minutes,
whatever, but you don’t have to be able to read and write to
do a video, and you can do it in your own language. I have a number of Hispanic and a number of other languages.
Audience: One
of the things that impact international policy right away is the
immigration policies. And
there’s, as you probably already know, there’s a lot
of undocumented people who are affected by this, and we will never
hear their voices. I
don’t know if we will.
Traub: We
have some. I won’t
tell you who, but we do. And
we also have pictures and photographs made by undocumented people
as well, that we know of. We
would never reveal that because we only know that by osmosis, but,
and I’m not saying we’re perfect that way, and I’m
not saying that we’ve served everybody, we haven’t I’m
sure, but I think we probably at least have presented the idea of
allowing anyone to come generally unfiltered, and that’s one
of the issues--none of these pictures are named. The only filtration that could happen,
and we were a little leery about it but we ultimately thought it
was the right thing to do, the FBI came in one day and didn’t
tell us we had to, but asked us to take a couple of pictures down. And the explanation was, and they explained it to us, pretty
much in detail, that there were several undercover people exposed
in those pictures and they didn’t want to compromise them and
they asked us not to do it. They
didn’t tell us we had to. So
we took them down. Similarly,
the FEMA people came in and, this is very important, have collected
in a separate file that we’ve given them, pictures of the buildings
burning and different stages of the buildings in collapse. The
reason they did that is they want to understand how the buildings
fell, how they burned, what the patterning of the burning, and this
gave them the best view because this was a view that you could see
those buildings from many, many angles, that people recorded, including
from as far away as Brooklyn to Staten Island to wherever. So
we were very pleased to be a part of that. And
they want to keep that indefinitely because they need to be able
to revisit that over and over again. EMS
workers came in and have discovered five missing people from the
photographs; identified them from the photographs.
Younger: But
they don’t get the negatives, they just get prints.
Traub: No! In
many cases they don’t even get the prints, they just look at
them on the web. They were looking at them on the walls. There
are untold possibilities about what a collection of this magnitude
might mean. But the biggest meaning, it goes back
to the several questions that have been raised, is that it is a model
for any community to react to whatever issue affects that community. And we are most successful if that gets
copied, frankly. And
it could be from one neighborhood to another. It
could be from a public school. It
could be ideally, at this moment, my model would be in Jerusalem
in a place where anybody could come in and bring pictures of what’s
going on there, because obviously most of what we’re seeing
is filtered in one way or another, or just not available to us. So
I don’t know what else to tell you. I encourage to come see the show. I encourage you to bring your own pictures in, not just of
9/11--I want to make that clear. We’re
not really interested in 9/11 anymore. We’re interested in how the world
looks now. You’ll
see when you go down there, pictures of that nature.
I will
tell you a little bit more and then end, about technology. I have been a proponent of digital technology for the last
20 years. My program
was the first major program to go digital. We
conceived it as a digital program. I
have been encouraging students and faculty and everybody to work
digitally. I think film
is dead. I think it’s
unnecessary, expensive, and truly an antiquated issue at this moment. (end of the tape) . . . must understand
now that that world is digital, and if you’re not savvy that
way, and you’re not operative that way, you will not succeed. I think equally, all of you should be
as versant in the digital video world as you are in the still video
world, because your opportunity of interacting between those two
disciplines is one in the same. If
it’s a dataset, you can convert it to practically anything. Your opportunities to publish yourself, to get into a network,
to get into something like this or form your own thing like this
and to be an independent and powerful voice is there for you. If your aspirations are to Chelsea and
the gallery world, for me, that’s the lowest common denominator
of it all in that it’s a nice idea and a way to make money
and fame, but it isn’t going to reach big numbers of people. The digital world, on the other hand, is a real world that
needs to be populated by the best and the brightest, and it needs
to be developed as a creative medium. I’m
not talking about digital re-touching and putting white heads on
black heads and so on and so forth, I’m talking about using
it as a channel, as a network of communication in the best and most
effective ways to reach people and to enjoin people in the commonality
of experience that does make us human. It
is affordable. It’s
relatively easy, and it’s collective in nature. Work together. Form
networks. Be involved
in the community of image and creative people in the broadest sense
of that. So that’s
what I have to say.
Audience: I
have a question along the lines of what you just said. I work digital in just about everything
at this point, but my concern still remains in terms of longevity. It seems that even though it’s
this really prevalent media, it’s still very fragile and I
wonder, with things being constantly upgraded and operating systems
changing. I still have my negatives, and you know.
. .
Traub: That’s
a good question, and I’m not telling anyone NOT to use film
for something highly specialized, but if you want to be proactive
and you want to be able to uplink and you want to be able to get
into print, as a journalist, you’re going to have to be digital. Now, there will be loss. There were always losses in negatives--fires burn up negatives
and people get them dirty and scratch them and lose them all the
times. Some of the most famous pictures in history, the negative
has been lost. So there’s
nothing new about that. You’re
going to have to update your hard drives. You’re
going to have to keep buying new equipment, just as you do your photographic
equipment, but the long-term cost of being digital versus the ecological
problems of chemistry and light and all that terrible . . . and I
have asthma and I know I got it from inhaling chemicals for years
after years. The ultimate
issue is to approach the digital world in the same way you would
learn and approach a learning curve with anything else that you do,
that there are problems, it’s not perfect, but the possibilities
we’re just beginning to tap. And
if you all shy away from it because you think Big Brother’s
controlling it or you think it’s not the artistic medium, then
it doesn’t go where it should go. Then it does fall back in the hands of
the wrong people. So
it is incumbent, and I think in particular at this moment in history
for the best and the brightest, which I assume you are, and most
energetic, to take these opportunities and run with them and inform
them. If you shy away from them and say, “Well, they have
control and they say
this, and the government says this and the FBI says this and
the New York Times says that,” you’re always talking
about a “they.” You
are “they.” You
are them. You are them,
and don’t forget it. But
if you stand on the sideline of all the time criticizing and don’t
try to change it or don’t try to get involved in it, you’re
just giving it to them. Whoever
them is. I sincerely mean that. I said that to my students the day after
9/11. You can criticize
all you want or you can step up to the plate and hit the ball. And that doesn’t mean you have
to follow the old rules nor become the good old boys of the past. You have to enlighten this world, and
this generation has the tools, the intelligence and the will to do
that. But you can’t do it from the sidelines,
you can’t do it as a precious artist saying, “I’m
an artist. I don’t
have to do anything about that.” I
sincerely mean that. The
art world isn’t very important right now in that sense. Art is only as important as it really does wake people up. It
affects them. It helps them to engage a meaningful
life. Selling to this
collection or that collection or that museum and that museum will
get you famous and you’ll have all this fame and everybody
will think you’re wonderful and you’ll be able to stand
aloof, but I’ll be damned if you’ll be worth much. I
really mean that. And
I’m an artist and I teach at an art institution. I’ve
been involved in that world for a long time. It’s just another form of celebrity
crap, as far as I’m concerned.
Audience: I
for one really appreciate the energy you’ve put into this. My mother worked on the 82nd floor
of the tower and she wasn’t at work that day. And I have lived in New York over the
years. I don’t
have any . . .
Traub: Did
she get out?
Audience: She
wasn’t there that day. She
lost four to five people in the business. But I agree with what you just said. I personally feel that the most successful
uses of the new technology that I’ve seen, especially over
the internet, are things that come up in speaking in descent against
the party line that we have in this country. And
the concern that I have with some of the things I’ve seen with
your project is that it’s not so much that it totes the party
line, but that the images can be used in a neutral sense. I didn’t get a sense, overall, that there was a questioning
of the Bush agenda, and that’s a problem that I have, given
how strong the presence. . .
Traub: Well,
we weren’t a politically activated energy. We were, if anything, and someone brought
the word up, we were a place where we thought--we didn’t know
where it was going to go, for one thing. We
had a sense that people needed to say something. I think what needed to be said was, “I
bore witness to this event.” Everybody needed to say, “I saw it.” Like I laid my stone at the grave, and
indeed when the wall came down in Berlin, they took a piece away
and that’s why people bought them. They
did not want to forget it. We
are still in a good deal of shock in this country, for good or for
bad. It’s only
nine months. If this
went on for nine years, that’d be something else. It
does have to move on. Even
the city said it, after May 30 we would not be looking back, we would
be looking forward to renewal. And
as I said, History Unframed, our energy is to do that. But it isn’t my place to criticize the Bush administration
in my show, any more than I would praise it. It is a place for people to bear witness. It
is a place for people to say what they want to say. If
you have that statement to make photographically, I encourage you
to bring it in. In other
words, there is default in everything, but what is that default? Is a default not to do it and to censor the people’s
view? No. So, yes, in any democracy there is always
that problem of something encouraging the wrong thing. There are plenty of things in the world
I would like to censor, that I don’t want to hear, that I don’t
want to see, that I don’t want you to see and I don’t
want him to see and her to see, but I don’t do it. Because to do it is a worse act. So, yes it might
go somewhere slightly negative for a while. I don’t think it will in the long term. We had a picture up of somebody, said,
well we’ve had people come in and say, “Why do you have
all these people from Afghanistan here. We
don’t like those people.” You
can say it. Fine. Say it if you want to say it, it’s
you’re business if you want to say it, but we ain’t taking
these pictures down. Then
someone else said, well, there’s a picture that says “Nuke ‘em
All.” I remember
this long-haired guy in the sandals and the whole works coming in
and saying, “You got to take that picture down, that’s
a terrible thing to be up there!” We
don’t do that. That’s
not what this is about. There’s
nothing wrong with setting up a website or an exhibition or a network
that is highly politicized. I’m not saying you have to copy
me exactly, or that takes an anti-Bush position, please, by all means,
but that wasn’t what motivated this particular act. I
use my vote and my money and other things to take those positions
and other activist things that I’ve done. But
this wasn’t about being for, against, in any particular way.
Younger: I
think one thing that’s come up over and over again in this
forum, and I don’t think I’ve ever really said it, is
that what they provided was a forum. They
didn’t give somebody voice. People
have voice. Everybody
has their voice. You
don’t give anybody voice. You give them a forum. You
give them a soapbox. You
give them a television station. You give them a radio station. You give them a book. You
give them a forum, not a voice. Because everybody has a voice. People used to come, organizers, in the neighborhood where
I used to live, and then they’d tell you what. . . you know,
they’d come and they’d start talking and they’d
tell you what you were supposed to think and what you were supposed
to do. Huh-uh! We know
what we’re supposed to do. We
know what we want done. We
know what needs to be done in our neighborhood, but what we need
is a TV station to listen to us. We
need to get on TV. We
need the forum, and we didn’t have it.
Traub: Well
you have the forum. The
Internet really is the forum. It
is imperfect. It needs
imagination. The biggest
problem of our government and the Bush’s and so on and so forth,
and there may be a Republican or somebody here on the other position
is free to talk, by the way, but the biggest problem is the failure
to seize the moment after 9/11 when you had a country together, when
you had a country that realized that violence is not a solution,
that there were young people like yourselves wanting to do something
to change things, and to come up with programs and ideas that could
activate people into those kinds of things. It’s a failure of imagination on the part of the administration,
to go back to the old cold war mentality, instead of to really act
in a new way, with a sense of a new vision, a new deal, a new society,
which could and may still happen. I
also blame the Democrats, by the way, who’ve just done nothing. Nothing! So, okay. We
can blame them and we can blame the Republicans and then there’s
you guys. What the fuck
are you going to do? Just
blame all the time? Or
are you going to get busy and do something? You
have the power. Take
it. Power, by the way, is never given. It’s only taken. It’s made. But no one is going to anoint you the
new minister of foreign affairs. You
want to be a minister of foreign affairs and change foreign affairs? Then
get involved in foreign affairs. Take
your cameras. Walk out
of this room tomorrow and go to the Congo. Go
to wherever. Do it. Just get out there and start doing it. Set
up a website and do it. It’s
your generation that’s going to make a different. I’m
too old. She’s
too old.
Younger: We
did it already in our time.
Traub: No,
we failed. Thank you
all.
(Applause)