Young, old, banker, firefighter: The democratization of death
The most affecting work of art inspired by 9/11 wasn't a work of art.
Instead, it was journalism, The
``Portraits" was, in fact, journalism at its most straightforward: 200-word biographical sketches of those who died in the World Trade Center attacks, each accompanied by a small headshot.
Among the works of art inspired by 9/11, what approached the simplicity, eloquence, and emotional power of those great, gray rectangles of newsprint? The very straightforwardness of ``Portraits" gave it an expressivity attained by only the most memorable art.
As moving as each person's story was, the strongest impact of ``Portraits" came not from reading the text but from looking at the pages as a whole. However inadvertently, they achieved a balance between individual and mass -- between personal loss and shared grief -- that seemed to capture the essence of 9/11. ``Portraits" uniquely conveyed the democratization of death that marked that day: male and female, young and old, American and foreign, banker and firefighter. There they all were. There, in a sense, were we all.
For all its artlessness, ``Portraits" might be seen as having two artistic forebears. One is quite mundane: the high school yearbook, that homeliest yet often most treasured of literary artifacts. The other is quite mundane, too, though it has an exalted pedigree, since it's a photograph taken by Walker Evans .
Called ``Penny Picture Display, " it shows a sign for a Savannah, Ga., photo studio. The sign consists of 225 thumbnail-sized portraits: all these average Americans posing for the camera, unaware of the place in posterity that awaits. ``I look at it," Evans said, ``and think, and think, and think about all those people."
Staff writer Mark Feeney covers photography and culture for the Globe. He can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com. 
