(Adapted from a post on Reading the Pictures, September 11, 2011.)
I can’t say whether these women—standing with other family members along the South Pool at the World Trade Center—are mothers, daughters, wives, or sisters of people killed on 9/11.
What is unmistakable, though, is their claim to belonging.
The photo’s force was its moral counterpoint to the post-9/11 climate: the far-right’s obsession with “radical Islam” (and Obama’s middle name), the fight over the so-called Ground Zero mosque, “homeland security,” airport screening, and a demand for retribution that fueled the unending war in Afghanistan and the catastrophic one in Iraq.
The two women in the foreground, gazing into their hands while the other mourners recede into blur, blend a communal ritual with an intimate act of devotion. The focus makes Muslim prayer impossible to treat as a background detail—the very opposite of the erasure again taking hold in political culture.
As before, the image asks what commemoration looks like when grief includes everyone.
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