On September 25, 2001, an exhibition opened in a previously vacant storefront in SoHo, perhaps 20 blocks from Ground Zero. Photographer Peress, who had been photographing the city for the New Yorker, Michael Shulan (who owned the building where the exhibit started) and two friends decided to hang pictures of the city by anybody and everybody who submitted them. The exhibition attracted thousands of submissions, and many thousands more visitors, and has toured in the U.S. and Europe, including stops at New York's Museum of Modern Art and Washington, D.C.'s Corcoran Gallery. The slip-cased, 12"×8 1/4" book presents 720 color and 160 duotone (and mostly full-page) portraits of the city in crisis, with crisp printing and no captions. While many of the images may resemble those seen repeatedly over the past year, this assemblage feels direct without being voyeuristic. If it is heavy on the flags, it is because the city was festooned at the time, and the pictures convey an array of different responses, personal and political, to the tragedy. This book really does, in Whitman's words, contain multitudes. (Sept.)
