Leo Rubinfien moved his wife and two sons into a TriBeCa neighborhood apartment two blocks from the World Trade Center on Sept. 4, 2001. The family witnessed firsthand the devastation that came a week later, but Rubinfien — then more than two decades into a celebrated career as a photographer and essayist — didn’t try to capture the horror of the Sept. 11 attacks with his camera.
“At the time, I could not imagine a way of doing anything with this in photography,” he says by phone from Manhattan, where he’s sitting in the same chair he was in when hijackers plowed American Airlines Flight 11 into the WTC’s North Tower seven years ago. “I thought that what was most important about what had happened was not accessible to the camera: All of us had believed ourselves to be living in a time of peace. It was really the psychological effect of Sept. 11, that was so specific to it.”
When Rubinfien did begin to probe at that psychological sea change, it was on a global scale. “Wounded Cities,” his exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, is composed of portrait-like street photos made in more than a dozen cities — from Jerusalem to London to Moscow to Madrid — each the victim of 21st-century terrorism. Rubinfien set out to capture something of the psychic residue of these calamities in the faces of his subjects. He did not pose them, nor did he attempt to disguise his camera. The faces in these images wear grave expressions, but it’s impossible to know for certain why.
“Is this person worrying about the atomic bomb, or is he worried about the chicken he left in the oven back in his apartment? Maybe his anxiety is absolutely trivial,” Rubinfien acknowledges. “But that’s the point: All of a sudden it’s so urgent to know so much about who surrounds you as you walk down the street, even as you realize that you know so little.”
The show’s earliest images are from Tokyo circa 2002; the most recent are from Karachi, Pakistan, in March of this year. Rubinfien took the latter pictures less than three months after former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s assassination last December, representing the shortest interval between the traumatic episode and Rubinfien’s photo session.
Rubinfien’s images are printed larger than life-size on watercolor paper and are suspended unframed by wires. The contrast of the delicate paper with the startling resolution of the images heightens their visceral effect.
“The paper is so big, they’re like sails,” Rubinfien says. “Anytime somebody walks through the room, they move. They’re constantly shivering and vibrating. In way, it’s like they’re breathing. It gives them a tremendously human quality that a picture locked up in a frame behind a sheet of glass loses.”
The unconventional mounting was a happy accident of finance: A European curator sought to exhibit more than 60 of the photos but found the cost of framing them prohibitive. But Rubinfien is right about the vulnerability the frameless mounting admits, proving the old adage that art thrives on restriction. It’s tough to imagine the vulnerability of his pictures coming through as powerfully in another setting.
“Anyone who sets off a bomb and blows up whomever happens to be standing there has reached a point in his own mind where he says, ‘These people, whom I will now erase, are not individuals; they’re representatives of some group,’ ” Rubinfien says. But the humanizing imperfections he’s preserved in his haunting photos — a loose thread on the button of a girl’s jacket, the stain of cigarette ash on a man’s hand — refute that notion unforgettably.
If you go
“Wounded Cities: Photographs by Leo Rubinfien”
Where: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 500 17th St. NW
When: Through Feb. 17, 2009
Info: $6; free for ages 6 and under
