Leslie Weinberg

September 11th Revisited 25 Years Later

Voices in the Wind , World Trade Center Documentary by Director Leslie D. Weinberg

During the fall of 2001, while finishing up my MFA in film at Columbia University, the catastrophic events of September 11^th occurred. On the Friday before the towers fell, it was an exquisitely beautiful fall day, but I woke up feeling a sense of dread and impending doom.

World Trade Center photographed on Friday Sept. 7, 2001

Not sure why, I decided to rent a bike to try and get out of my funk. I rode from mid-town down the West Side Highway with a small backpack, a book, and a towel so I could sit in the grassy park near the World Trade Center. Regretting not bringing my camera, I bought a disposable black and white plastic camera at a nearby kiosk with one roll of 24 black-and-white film inside.

Twin Towers with ‘Battery Park Boob’ sculpture by Louise Bourgeois. Lower Manhattan, 2001

I wandered around the towers and took these photos. Later in the afternoon, I called a friend who met me at the plaza between the towers to listen to some jazz music on the mall, which happened every Friday afternoon. My mood had lifted as people working in the buildings came out to share some good vibes after the workweek. I met a nice guy that day who worked in the towers who gave me his number. I was planning to call him the following week, but sadly discovered his number was disconnected.

World Trade Center viewed from the West Side Highway, Sept 7, 2001

On that fateful day, I was about to leave my apartment in mid-town on the west side around 8:30 a.m. to attend my production internship downtown. While getting ready to go, I heard the news on the radio that a bomb had hit the World Trade Center.

Towers 1 and 2 World Trade Center, Sept 7, 2001

My first impulse was to grab a camera and go to the roof of my high-rise building, where I knew there was a clear view of lower Manhattan and the World Trade Center. I watched in horror as a plane hit the second tower while the first tower fell. Seeing it in real-time and not with the rectangular borders of the TV was unbelievably surreal. My neighbors on the roof, cried and hugged realizing their loved ones who had left that morning to work at the Trade Center could not be reached.

View from my rooftop the morning of 9/11/01

As a film student, in shock and unsure what to do with myself, I did the only thing that gave me some sense of comfort and normalcy. It was not a time to sit alone in one’s apartment, so I felt compelled to go out with my camera and capture this moment when all New Yorkers seemed bonded in shock and grief. I packed up my camera bag and set out to capture footage and interview anyone who wanted to talk. It was therapy for me and for others to express their emotions during this time of rare comradery among usually stoic New Yorkers. In the weeks and months that followed, I went out with my video camera whenever I felt blue, continuing my documentary project. Each time I interviewed someone, I felt a little better. Making the film helped me to put this event into perspective by getting other viewpoints. After one year of interviews, I had collected over forty-five hours of footage, which resulted in the following 45-minute documentary, which was mostly overlooked in the glut of media coverage.

But my perspective has changed after twenty-five years, and each time I watch it it becomes more meaningful. As time passes the small moments captured my film seem to have more weight. City dwellers united in harmony and empathy was an unexpected by-product of the immense heaviness of the tragedy.

There are some hopeful moments of song, humor, and irony thrown into the mix. Voices in the Wind was screened in several festivals around America, most notably in Los Angeles at the beautiful vintage Fine Art Theatre in 2005. Some of my footage was used in a group documentary for HBO; some was donated to the National Archives and Records Administration.

Fine Arts Theater Marque, Los Angeles, 2005

Leslie D. Weinberg is a photographer, writer, and documentary filmmaker. She graduated from Columbia University Film School with an MFA in 2002. Currently, working on another personal documentary about Left-Handedness, Leslie makes picture books for adults and children through her independent publishing company, Aker Press. For image usage or further info please contact: Leslie@AkerPress.com

LDWproductions.com

The Punctual Photographer

Anyone who knows me or has ever spent any time in my company knows one thing for sure, I am rarely on time, other people’s time that is. I have my own very distinctive rhythm in my life and my attitude is that time doesn’t really exist. It exists only in a relative world and from the standpoint of clocks and people using it as a reference point so they can have meetings etc. but ultimately my belief is that time doesn’t exist. If I show up someplace does it really matter the time? I am there and whatever sequence of events happening at that particular moment is all that matters. That moment is all that matters. When I take a pictere it’s a confluence of events occurring at the particular moment that I liberate with my camera.

Simply, whenever I arrive is precisely the right moment for me to be there.

The picture is waiting to be taken by me and my unique perspective. I’m not wondering what my watch says when I take a photograph. I’m wondering how the light is casting itself on my subject and what is happening inside the frame of the photo which reflects my frame of consciousness.

Timing is everything when taking a picture. A still photo is capturing a single moment in time, which reflects everything going on in my vision at that moment. This was done beautifully by Henri Cartier-Bresson, an iconic influence of my photography.

Cartier-Bresson coined the term, The Decisive Moment, as “a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. Oop-la! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.”

Life is a series of unrepeatable moments. Only through a photo can we bring ourselves back to that particular moment in time. And even then, it’s still not the moment, but a mere representation of it.

The Filmless Photographer

I was recently introduced to the term “Spiritual Materialism” having heard it in connection with the Sedona sweat lodge deaths and then read another reference to it in a Buddhist blog. It makes me think about myself in connection to being a photographer. I wonder, does my need to posses an image makes me a spiritual materialist?

When I get an impulse to take a picture it’s a transcendent moment where I connect with something outside myself, a thought form that has manifest itself into this spatial relationship of things with light. Everything comes together for an instant and the light is perfect so I have an impulse to capture it. But the next moment when I’m actually ready to take the photo is a completely different moment and the light may have shifted with a passing cloud or the person who was walking by in the frame of my mind is gone. So I’m getting a slightly or sometimes completely different image than my original impulse although it may be “close enough” in time to be an approximation to convey my idea.

Still, my desire to capture and fix that image to share with others or perhaps sell might make me a spiritual materialist…Otherwise I would be content to simply observe what’s happening without being compelled try and “own” it.

Maybe a more important question to ponder is if it’s even possible to capture the spirit through the lens onto paper? The answer is a dichotomy. It is possible, yes, because we have learned to read and interpret the subtile information conveyed by the photographer inside the rectangular canvas of the photograph. But nothing can truely replace the feeling of spirit the photographer receives in that impulse to take a picture. Even the most sublime image is a mere translation of that impulse, a generation or two away from the original pure thought form. The resulting image is at best a representation of the intangible.

Maybe the next stage of technology is to transmit images from a simple thought where the movie that plays out in my mind can be fixed onto film (or celuloid.)

Speaking of plastic, I want to announce in my second blog entry that I prefer film to digital medium. Although I sometimes use the tools of Photoshop to tweak an image, I draw a distinction between the original capturing of an image on film as opposed to digital. After all what is a digital image? It’s no more than a series of x’s and o’s which can be lost in a nano second with the flick of the wrong button. Whereas film is fixed through a chemical process onto a negative (or a positive). That means I have something tangible with film. Something I can touch, look through, and keep, as opposed to a digital file which exists somewhere on my computer in a cyber bin which may mysteriously disppear if my computer crashes or develops a virus.

Even though for convenience, I own a small digital camera as a back up to my film cameras, I believe the sensuality and beauty of film is far superior and unequal in countless ways to the digital image. Thus I have made a conscious decision not to join the digital revolution when it comes to photography. I believe that the images captured on film will last longer than digital images. I’m also convinced that film, both in still or moving images, posesses a subtlety and even sometimes a quirky nature as mistakes happen with film such as lens flaires and certain ways that light looks on film that I find lacking in a digital image.

Although undisputably more convenient, the digital camera is the fast food equivilant of McDonald’s, supporting the disposable nature of our society of instant gratification. I don’t mind waiting for my film to be developed to see my pictures. When I take a trip to someplace exotic, like Tibet, it’s really a treat to get view the photos after I’m settled in at home and reflecting on my recent adventure. I get to experience the trip again. I like the element of surprise to see what I got.

Sometimes mistakes made with film are a happy accidents producing cruious unintentional yet magical images. How could I have that perspective at the moment just after taking the photo? With a digital camera I would be inclined to delete something if I thought I had made a mistake or it was not the picture I intended to take. With a film camera, I’m focusing on taking the next photo, rather than spending precious time going back to the previous moment to check the photo. Also each photo matters more since I only have 36 takes on a roll of film.

My decision to remain a film photographer in the digital age is partly a practical one as I have spent two decades of my life collecting the lenses and cameras needed for my craft. I won’t sell my equipment getting less than half paid for only to spend thousands of dollars on new equipment that requires hours reading manuals (which I won’t do ) in order to operate a new camera, which will be outmodeled in less than a year.

Photography should be simple and pleasurable. To my aesthetic, the fuzzy roughness of a pin hole camera image is infinitely more beautiful than a digital image focused and color corrected to perfection.

The Accidental Photographer

I have declaration to make in my first blog. I have quit my TV! In my relocation to Los Angeles, I had my small thin box sitting on a table for weeks to busy to hook it up, when I suddenly realized that my mind was much cleaner and clearer without all the crap being poured into it on a daily basis through television. I felt like I was eating junk food all the time being forced to constantly look commercials of revolting images of food. Although my stomach wasn’t digesting it, my brain was. I guess that’s the hypnotic manipulative medium of television. I don’t mean to completely disqualify TV. It has the potential to transmit relevant information instantly. But thankfully so can the internet. There were several shows I watched faithfully every week which caused a few withdrawal symptoms, until I found them readily available for viewing on the web.

In a world of chaos and constant onslaught of millions of images, the ones we view are crucial to the world we create for ourselves. Our reality is comprised from the information we allow into our brain and our computers which reflect our brain. Since I view the world through my eyes, the window to my soul, this makes my eyes my unique lens. We are all photographers capturing images from our iris or internal cameras .With all the information that passes thru my lens being bombarded with advertising images from television, billboards and computers, it is a challenge to filter out the superfluous trash always trying to get in.

Americans are addicted to television. There should be TVA meetings (television anon) to help people recover from television addiction. People don’t realize how they are brainwashed and hypnotized by commercials and infomercials, especially just before sleep and upon awakening when the brain is shutting down or waking up and is more maluable. Garbage in, garbage out.

I may decide to go back to television in a limited way, but for now I’m enjoying taking a break from it. I’m getting much more accomplished like writing this blog which I’ve wanted to do for at least a year.