When I first looked at the picture above, my first thought was that these people, witnesses to the terrible 9/11, do not care. They are simply Hedonists enjoying a beautiful fall day.
Boy, was I ever wrong!
The next day the journalist Daniel Plotz wrote a piece on Slate that disputed Mr. Rich, calling his reading of the image a "cheap shot." In Mr. Plotz's view the five have not ignored or moved beyond 9/11 but have "turned toward each other for solace and for debate." He asked any of the people in the photograph to contact Slate and describe the event from their side of the lens.
First to respond was Walter Sipser, a Brooklyn artist.
"A snapshot can make mourners attending a funeral look like they're having a party," he wrote. "Had Hoepker walked fifty feet over to introduce himself he would have discovered a bunch of New Yorkers in the middle of an animated discussion about what had just happened." Another figure in the picture who wrote in was Chris Schiavo, a professional photographer. She bitterly chastised both Mr. Rich and Mr. Hoepker for their "cynical expression of an assumed reality." As a "third-generation native New Yorker, who knows and loves every square inch of this city," whose "mother even worked for Minoru Yamasaki, the World Trade Center architect," she stated that "it was genetically impossible for me to be unaffected by this event."
So a picture does speak a thousand words, but sometimes a 1,000 words of lies.
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