10 September - 29 October 2011
Polka Galerie

In Memoriam: New York - New York / L'oeil d'Istanbul / Monumenta

Ethan Levitas, Reza, Ara Güler, Ahmet Ertug

New York - New York
Clark, Levitas, Reisinger, Reza, Tannenbaum, Turpin

Between testimony and tribute, the group exhibition “New York-New York” returns to, ten years after, the most important attack of the History.

All began on the 9th of September, 2001. Massoud, the leader of the Northern alliance and an opponent of Osama bin Laden, is murdered in Afghanistan. In 1985, Reza, a close friend of Massoud, took the famous portrait of man known as the “Lion of Panjshir”.

On September 11th, 2011, the United Airlines flight number 175 crashes on the South tower of the World Trade Center. For the last twenty minutes, the journalists had been commenting on the crash of the first plane in the North tower, believing it was an accident. A frosty silence seized the editorial offices: the American nation is attacked. A dread expressed in the pictures of Robert Clark: four snapshots taken from the roof of his building in Brooklyn through which he records, stoical, the attacks.

Within minutes, Klaus Reisinger and then Allan Tannenbaum arrived at the foot of the towers. The photographers offer to the world a powerful testimony of the chaotic atmosphere. As the towers fell, the streets dove into darkness, stifled by ashes. There remains only ruins that rise like cathedrals. Among the wreckage, the firemen call: “Hello, is anybody there? Hello?” They are the new heroes of the nation.

Ten years passed, the city still has its scars. Ten years during which the French photographer Jean-Michel Turpin followed the convalescence of New York and the New Yorkers. The dream came back, the patriotism stayed on and the firemen are still heroes.

In 2011, Ethan Levitas took pictures of those who passby Ground Zero, a photographic essay, an echo of those who were there then and no longer so. A study about the present into the past and back again, a folding and unfolding of time.