Moving On

Yesterday I worked on an interesting assignment for a regular client, The Boston Globe. The story was a different take on the annual remembrance of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. The reporter, David Filipov, was writing about his own personal experience and how it paralleled that of the city's. David's father was on American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to crash into the towers. David was in Moscow at the time covering the one year anniversary of the sunken Soviet submarine. David's been to Ground Zero before but has avoided coming down to the site during the annual memorials. He's actually avoided any acknowledgment of the anniversary, until this year. So the story was a bit non-traditional in being first person but it became an interesting way to examine the ways both an individual and a city move on from tragedy. Below are some of the other pictures I submitted, the first one is of David looking for a photo of his father at the Tribute WTC Visitor Center. It is also the image that was on the paper's front page this morning.

As a journalist, I really like stories like this. From my perspective, it's a story that relies on the ability of a photographer to see images and not rely on just stuff that happens in front of them. To me these images get at the idea of the mood of this part of the city now. It can be dark, have odd juxtapositions, powerful, harried, poetic. Fences surround the site and construction workers are EVERYWHERE. The image of the guy with the Statue of Liberty mime was so strange. Here you have a field of flags with the names of the WTC victims and there's tourists doing goofy posed pictures right next to it. It's where traditional New York tourism butts up against the solemn memory of the attacks. Ground Zero has become another thing on the list that people visit. In this image, Michael Sinclair photographs the front of NYFD Ladder 10, the fire department that's across the street from the site. Sinclair and his family came to NY from Belfast, Ireland as part of a trip to the States that includes a few days in Florida. Visiting Ground Zero was the first thing on their list of sites to visit.


Here's a link to a story David, who was the paper's Moscow bureau chief for about 14 years, wrote from Afghanistan in November 2001. David also covered the Iraq war for the Globe.