Altered Photo
Original Photo
For this photoshop project I chose to alter an iconic picture of the Twin Towers exploding on September 11th, 2001. As a native New Yorker, remembrance of this date is a quintessential part of our culture and community. To this day, every September 11th is a time of mourning in the city, as a bright memorial lights up the sky for the entire month and hundreds of police patrol the West Side Highway. In New York, The World Trade Center and the people who’s lives were lost on that day are remembered and celebrated constantly, but this year, as I spent my first 9/11 outside of the city, in Chicago, I realized that everyone else in the rest of the nation has pretty much forgot them. It struck me that when non-New-Yorkers think of 9/11, if they do at all, they don’t think about the great minds lost inside necessarily, or the loss of part of the NYC skyline that lived in infamy. They think of an explosion and a brief national state of emergency, a day frozen in the past. I tried to represent this phenomenon by leaving the fire, smoke and debris in the photo and taking out the towers themselves, so that the “action-movie-esque” explosion is the subject, and not the people or the towers that were the real victims of the tragedy.
Sam Hultberg 