|
Wounded Cities.
Photography by Leo Rubinfien. Text by Leo Rubinfien.
Steidl & Partners.,
2008.
242 pp.,
All pages gatefolds, 60 color illustrations.,
10¾x6¾".
Publisher's Description
One week before September 11, 2001, Leo Rubinfien, his wife and small children moved into a new
apartment next door to theWorld Trade Center in New York. They witnessed the violence of that
day close up, fled with the evacuees and later returned to a damaged home and a city whose
wounds have remained open for years. The physical destruction in Manhattan was plain to all, but
Rubinfien quickly understood that the hidden “mental wound” was the more profound one, and
in 2002 he began to photograph in cities around the world that had suffered severely, in recent
times, from terror attacks. Over five years he would visit locations that included London, Nairobi,
Kuta Beach, Moscow, Buenos Aires, Istanbul and Colombo, looking intimately at the ordinary people
of those cities and searching their faces to see how the anxious air of the terror era had
touched and shaped their worlds. Wounded Cities combines 60 intensely evocative photographs
from this project with a memoir in which Rubinfien explores the anguish and the political passions
of September 11 and its repercussions in an intimate prose style akin to his photography. The
book’s unusual page design—every page is a fully printed gatefold—weaves Rubinfien’s words
and images into one of the most original hybrid books photography has produced.
|
back