The Exceptionalist Optics of 9/11 Photography

Abstract

During and after the 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington, thousands of photographs were taken. None, however, would become as iconic as Thomas Franklin's photo of three firefighters raising an American flag above the rubble of the World Trade Center. Franklin's photo, I argue in this essay, casts 9/11 in the familiar myth of American exceptionalism, screening out but still gesturing to the heterogeneous memories left unsettled and animate in amateur photographs, missing-person posters, bodies in pain, and performance. In considering the struggle over the visual memory of the attacks, I first consider how, in the wake of 9/11, the discourse of exceptionalism served to disavow the exceptions historically taken by the state and to rationalize the War on Terror. I show how this system of myths works in dialectical relation to other disruptive forms of cultural memory. I then read Franklin's iconic photograph as a screen by which traumatic memories are masked and onto which nationalist desires are projected. Finally, I analyze 9/11 photography that troubles the exceptionalist optics of Franklin's photo by evoking the visual legacy of the Vietnam War and so challenging the logic of righteous warfare.