Wounded Cities Photographs by Leo Rubinfien

On the morning of September 11, 2001, the photographer Leo Rubinfien was in his Manhattan apartment across the street from the World Trade Center, and watched from close up as the hijacked airplanes struck the towers. Through those hours of destruction and the subsequent days of displacement, he never picked up a camera, but months afterward, while working in Tokyo at the time of the first Bali bombings, he began to recognize the aftereffects of “freelance warfare” in people who had known terrorism in their own recent past. He was less interested in physical wounds than in the psychological marks an attack can leave—in the sorrow, fear and nobility it may imprint on the faces of its survivors. “I found myself searching the faces on each street corner,” he wrote later, “where, as people waited for the light to change…I would hope to discover indications of who they really were, what they really felt and thought. I began to photograph some of the people, almost as if the pictures might contain clues.”

Over the next six years, Rubinfien journeyed to more than 20 cities around the world—including London, Buenos Aires, Madrid, Istanbul, Nairobi, Karachi and Jerusalem—searching out what he called the “mental wound” that he himself had felt in New York. The resulting portraits, marked by their intimacy and exquisite craftsmanship, are premiered at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Large prints from this project float in the gallery without frames, offering an experience of great immediacy and deep feeling.

“Little in any of the pictures says obviously that terror is their subject,” Rubinfien wrote. There is one photograph, from Tel Aviv, of a woman whose face has been badly wounded and surgically rebuilt…but I cannot say that the cause was a bomb, rather than accident or cancer. …My aim in the pictures was never documentary, but to evoke what it has been like to live in the limbo into which the terror era has thrown us—not just New Yorkers, but the people of many of the world’s great cities.”

The book Wounded Cities (Steidl, 2008), from which the Corcoran’s exhibition is drawn, includes an extended memoir of the anguish and political passions of the years since the September 11 attacks, weaving together an innovative hybrid of image and word in a volume that is also remarkable for its unusual design.

Artist Biography Leo Rubinfien (b. 1953, Chicago) is an acclaimed photographer who began exhibiting in the 1980s, soon after graduating from the Yale University School of Art. He was an insatiable traveler from the start, and his early work was distinguished by its use of rich color and its attention to what would be called “globalization” in the years to come. Reviewing his first one-person exhibition at Castelli Graphics, New York, in 1982, Art in America called Rubinfien one of the most promising of the generation of young color photographers who were then rising to prominence. A Map of the East, Rubinfien’s first book of photographs, was the source for his one-person exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in1992–1993. Metropolitan Museum of Art Curator Maria Morris-Hambourg described the work as “a new kind of traveling picture-poem.” Rubinfien went on to exhibit at major institutions in the United States, Europe, and Japan, including the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, and his photographs are part of numerous public and private collections. Rubinfien is also an admired writer, whose essays on photographers of the 20th century are among the key texts on photography. From 2002 to 2004, he was guest co-curator of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective of Japanese photographer Shomei Tomatsu.

Wounded Cities Photographs by Leo Rubinfien