Facing Reality

On Streets Transformed by Terror, A Photographer's Focus Is People

Saw the flash . . . women, children . . . plate glass scaling through the air . . . one minute just a blue truck parking by the market, then . . . heard somebody screaming and it was me . . . saw a plane where you don't see planes . . . a shoe lying there with the foot still in it . . . the wall collapsed like it was melting . . . hidden under her robes . . . on the sidewalk like he was just sleeping . . . if I'd left the cafe 30 seconds later . . . what kind of person . . .

Terrorism creates witnesses, onlookers, bystanders, survivors. That's the point. It terrorizes them -- changes them forever, gives them dreams where they see the bicyclist again and again and they try to shout that he's going to . . . terrible moments for years on subways, a dead spot in their souls. It sucks the meaning out of their lives, and they'll never get all of it back.

Leo Rubinfien, photographer and writer, was in his apartment two blocks from the World Trade Center when the planes hit, Sept. 11, 2001.

"The plane was moving far faster than you ever saw one go so low in the sky . . . jagged tear in the north tower . . . exploded . . . hot and orange, the great gassy flower blew out," he writes in "Wounded Cities," a book that accompanies his photography show of the same name at the Corcoran Gallery.

Unlike so many other photographers, Rubinfien never made the disaster site his subject. He reasoned that yes, there were rubble, chaos and heroism to photograph. But the terror itself lived on in the minds and hearts of its witnesses, in their recognition of a truth contrary to anything they'd imagined, as if some bedrock had given way and reality itself had betrayed them.

He wanted to show this in pictures. He knew he would find it only in faces, not in wreckage or corpses.

He traveled to places that had suffered terrorist attacks: Tokyo; Tel Aviv; Istanbul; Manila; Colombo, Sri Lanka; Bali, Indonesia; Buenos Aires.

Unlike generations of documentary photographers recording the troubles of the world, he made no effort to reveal private truths lurking beneath public faces.

Instead, he used people on the streets as unwitting actors. He had no idea what they were thinking about. They could have been fearing the suicide explosion of the taxi next to them, or "they could have been worrying about a chicken they left in the oven," he says. It didn't matter.

These pictures -- 5 by 6 feet, mostly black-and-white -- don't tell the truth about these people as much as they tell a truth with these people, as if they were figures in a Crucifixion pageant, standing beneath the cross, astonished, frightened, their faces asking, "Did you really think this couldn't happen?" They are accidental models. The pictures look like documents, but they aren't. They're nothing but art. He has escaped the idea of the photograph as fact-in-itself, as a physical record of reality, and given us a concept instead, a fiction.

It's a fiction you believe, for the moment, like all good fiction. You become complicit in Rubinfien's chicanery. Instead of seeing people worried about lost car keys, you willingly see witnesses of terror.

You behold the astonished disgust of a woman in Tel Aviv, the desperate contempt of a man by a stoplight in Madrid, the sad amazement of an old woman in London who can take small comfort only in knowing that after all she has seen and learned, she still has not lost her capacity for shock. A man in Moscow sees the horror once more -- he knows too much and knows that he knows it. A toddler in Mombasa, Kenya, stares with the terrible coldness of children while the mother bows her head in sorrow. A young blonde in Moscow smokes a cigarette and thinks about a new future racing toward her and wonders what she'll have to do to survive it, how demeaning it will get.

Peering from corners, staring at the sky, these faces seem both appalled and relieved to note that they are bearing the unbearable, and holding up quite nicely, thank you. Or they are cynics disappointed to discover that they were right all along, that there is no such thing as cynicism, their most caustic and dismissive opinions are ordinary truth.

Looked at each other with a wild surmise . . . changed, changed utterly . . .

Or they're worried about the chicken they left in the oven.

Walker Evans, who documented faces of the Depression, once said that he didn't think a photograph told you anything about the inner person. We don't like to think that's true. Hence the public acclaim for Richard Avedon, whose famous faces are upstairs at the Corcoran right now, with their pretense of showing you the real Eisenhower, the real Kissinger. But it was usually a photographer's trick that Avedon played to make you think you were seeing the alienation or bewilderment behind bright, wise, courageous faces.

Here in a downstairs gallery, in a show curated by Philip Brookman with his usual deft clarity, Rubinfien goes beyond this conceit of insight and simply uses the people he photographs to illustrate what he himself felt, knew and would never forget after 9/11. And beyond that, he shows us a side of humanity that we all recognize thanks to the most expressive medium in the world, the human face, which sends signals with near-perfect efficiency. You see. You know.

Wounded Cities, through Feb. 16 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, 500 17th St. NW. For information, call 202-639-1700 or visit http://www.corcoran.org.