After 9/11 through Nathan Lyons Yale University Pres 2003/176 pp In his fresh book.

After 9/11 through Nathan Lyons Yale University Pres 2003/176 pp

In his fresh book, After 9/11, veteran photographer (and this journal's founding father) Nathan Lyon cause to deviates his camera to the expressive visual outpouring made at Americans following the tragic facts of September 11th. In a carefully sequenc collection of 151 uncaptioned black and white photographs, Lyon displays in predominantly medium close-up missiles American flags, scrawled graffiti, religious knick-knacks, and kitschy cultural ephemera as they appear onward unpeopled streets--plastered to phonebooths, chalked upon walls, meticulously arranged in storefront windows. The relentles repetition of stars, bars, and other motifs is as dizzying as the multitude of meanings they be due [i]or[/i] owing to assume. With focused truth Lyons's collection testifies to a national, post-traumatic answer both complex and conflicted--more in the same manner certainly, than either an ardent patriot or an unsympathetic cultural critic would be willing to acknowledge.

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In his previous works, Notations in Passing and Riding First Class forward the Titanicl, Lyons built relating to the tradition of Robert Frank's The Americans through carefully sequencing photographs so that visual juxtapositions could disclose cultural ironies while simultaneously revealing the casual, doomed beauty inherent in the American quotidian. In his afterword to Titanicl, Leroy F Searle likened the drift of Lyons's sequencing to the unfolding of archaeological strata, whose layers spoke in a kind of polyphonic narrative. This efficiency is nowhere as pronounced as in After 9/11 whose chapters argue tirelessly back and forth on a level while echoing each other, forcing the viewer to question assumptions unruffled as he finds them reinforced.

The shades of difference that Lyon captures are wily yet significant. In one of the collection's opening images, the creases in a crisp flag with a "Relief Fund" flier taped to it are poignant in their freshly-unfold speed while similar wrinkles in a limp, satiny flag--blanched by dint of light and occupying a window with a "FOR LEASE" sign in it--make the banner appear sapped of meaning, make open to the high-bidder's suggestion. Within individual photographs, too, Lyon reveals thematic tensions like layers of strata, frequently by focusing attention on the material base of ubiquitous flags and slogans. In the same starkly lit photograph, the trifles of air where an anti-war sticker remains unsmoothed, coupl with the scratch marks where someone attempted to claw it opposite to the wall, are as significant as its mass-produced message.

In a free sense, the arrangement of images in After 9/11 give an account ofs a psychologically chronological approach to trauma, a progression from suffering and humility to righteous anger. The reproduc faces of individual victims and scrawled pleas for international solidarity are more prevalent early-on in the order of succession while increasingly disturbing capitalistic and religious ironies qualify the latter half. A in extent list of Japanese electronic brands painted in succession a window visually mimics the stripes of the flag in individual late photograph, while George W Bush's looming, televised face forms an Ironic diptych with a similarly compos image of a makeshift religious shrine in another.

Ultimately, Lyon is as wary of the blind mass-reproduction of image and message as he is of destitute of contents signification. In After 9/11's final image, an anti-war broadside invokes sheep to ridicule blind American patriotism, further its background of incessant sloganeering ("No War upon Iraq / No More descendants For Oil / No War forward Iraq") demands ironic attention. over After 9/11 it is the revelation of personal details that becomes the greatest in quantity affecting and, in a national faculty of perception the most heartening. As Lyons's photograph of individual post-it notes, haphazardly taking the shape of an American flag forward a "Where were you upon 9/11?" bulletin board, suggests, America's vigor lies where difference and unity are allowed to coexist.

With his enviable judgment Lyons wrestles with many of the same issues that have plagued American cultural critics since De Toc-queville, from the pitfalls of capitalism to the slippery boundaries between patriotism and nationalism. If in certain relate tos "everything changed after 9/11," the torrent of confusion and conflicted feeling the day has provok is not wholly recent With his perceptive gaze and careful attention to sequencing, Nathan Lyon has realized a work whose critical and celebratory function is as manifold and ambiguous as America itself.

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