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The Disaster Series
Working on The Disaster Series photographs
has been my way of responding to the disasters that are looming
everywhere in the public and the private. I started photographing
The Disaster Series in January 2002, during a period of
great sadness – five
months after my then-partner’s mother’s suicide and
four months after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center.
For Christmas 2001, my sister gave me a picture book of photographs
from 9-11. I first rejected the book as a tasteless souvenir, but
when I finally looked inside of it, I felt as though the images
captured my private despair perfectly. I took the inescapable images
of survivors fleeing the towers and transplanted them onto my face
and body, setting the scenes in different places – the Midwest,
Sedona, Times Square, a Florida beach. It is never clear what my
characters in the disasters are gasping at or running away from;
instead, the focus is on the terror in their faces. By hiding the
precise nature of the disaster off camera, the emphasis is on the
personal impact of terror and the familiar images of faces devastated
by hurricanes, terrorists, and grief.
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