On the Spot: Leo Rubinfien's "Wounded Cities"

A LOT HAS BEEN said about Sept. 11, 2001, and with good reason. But Leo Rubinfien might be the only person to say something about it by photographing strangers — people likely uninvolved in the disasters of that day, pictured un-posed on the street in various countries. The result was a cornucopia of anxious and uncertain people, whether clearly recently traumatized or not. Rubinfien's book of this street photography, "Wounded Cities," has been adapted into a show at the Corcoran.

» EXPRESS: What got you started?
» RUBINFIEN: Well, my wife and I got an apartment in lower Manhattan around September 5th, 2001. We were there. It was traumatic. Afterwards, people asked, "Did you photograph the events?" I didn't.

» EXPRESS: Why not?
» RUBINFIEN:The physical damage didn't begin to tell what had happened; the true effect was the mental wound. That's something hard for photographs to [address]; they can't describe what's inside someone's mind — they can only describe a face.

And yet, this seemed to be the important thing to try to do. I started photographing in cities that [were victims of terror] around the world. Although in America we like to believe that September 11 was unprecedented, it was only so in its scale; [terrorism] has been going on for a very long time.

» EXPRESS: Who did you photograph?
» RUBINFIEN: All of the pictures were made in public; they're all ordinary people. There's nobody who I know to have been a victim.

» EXPRESS: Then you sought people who seemed traumatized?
» RUBINFIEN: You have no idea what's going on in the mind of any person you look at, you know. You see a person who looks very anxious, but what's he anxious about? Is he worrying about nuclear war, or is he worrying about the chicken that he left in the oven? You have no idea. But you can make a picture in which "I don't know" is the subject — our own uncertainty.

» EXPRESS: How did people react?
» RUBINFIEN: It varied. There are places where people are very welcoming; there are places where people are suspicious. There was a period in New York when people were frightened of almost anything; and in Nairobi, six or eight years after the embassy bombings, a woman came up to me and said, "You know, we had a bombing here, and I love my country. How do you want to hurt us?"

» EXPRESS: Seems like you're addressing war photography's pitfall — depicting the act and not the aftermath.
» RUBINFIEN: In general, if you photograph a dead person, it doesn't help you understand. What [the world's] caught up in recently is not war, but a state in which war and peace go on at the same time, in which the [general] peace blinds you to the extent of the violence that's also going on.

» Corcoran Gallery of Art, 500 17th St. NW; opens Sat., through Feb. 16, $6. 202-639-1700. (Farragut West)

Written by Chris Combs/Express
Photo courtesy of Leo Rubinfien