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I Watched it on TV: Media 9.11 Handmade
book, composed of TV stills, collected emails, and interviews "Where were you when JFK was shot? Where were you when the Challenger exploded?" Even in the midst of live coverage of the events of September 11, the media created a framework and a language that will serve as the eternal, iconic representation of these events. Moments of relevance were foregrounded and repeated, while other images and scenes were shown once and disappeared forever. Much of the "history" and "memory" of the events of September 11 will be shaped by the media, while many of the individual memories we all have will be blunted by the repetition of symbols chosen by the media. Our sense of history will be altered and defined by the very form that we rely on to preserve that history. In the days after September 11, I interviewed several friends and acquaintances about their perceptions of the role of the media in framing the events of that day. I tried to span many age groups, ethnic backgrounds, and genders. The resulting book, I Watched It On TV: Media 9.11, is a culling of quotes from these interviews, combined with images I photographed off the television during and after the events. The composition and layout are intended to illustrate the intrusion of the media in the depictions of the events, finding a relationship between media iconography and personal memory. |