NATHAN LYONS

AFTER 9/11

August 25- October 18, 2003
Contact Sheet 123


Language is only a system of symbols until a poet makes the combination of words, cadence, punctuation, and rhythm sing, while struggling to find meaning in the chorus. In After 9/11 Lyons has found perfect pitch and illuminated layers of meaning about our collective selves in one of our nation’s darkest moments. Like most people, he experienced the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 through the television. He immediately began to photograph the unconscionable pictures off of his television screen as a gut response to an inconsolable reality.

Over the next thirteen months Lyons would make hundreds of photographs in New York City, as well as in other cities and towns across the country, in order to focus his initial personal response to the tragedy into a penetrating look at America’s response to this life-changing moment of modern madness.

Lyons believes that the marriage of form and function creates complex meaning in a sequence of photographs. The symbol of the flag is present in many of his photographs, and he has constructed the majority of the images to, in fact, look like flags. Every picture is horizontal and has its own flag-like structure waving from left to right. The visual language (how the photograph is structured) becomes the devise used to communicate the more complicated analysis of our collective response to the tragedy, which ranges from unimagined loss to knee-jerk patriotism to crass commercialism.

When you look at each image in this exhibition from first to last, you will find a complex range of emotions, responses, and realities. Throughout his career, and particularly in this body of work, Nathan Lyons is not after better answers, only better questions.