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Twin Towers Remembered: A Selection of Camilo José Vergara’s photographs

November 10, 2001 - March 10, 2002

 

The National Building Museum proudly presents this selection of Camilo José Vergara’s photographs documenting the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers. These images constitute a body of work like no other. 

For more than thirty years, Vergara continuously photographed the 110-story buildings, which were designed by the architects Minoru Yamasaki and Emery Roth & Sons and engineered by Leslie Robertson, then of Skilling Helle Christiansen & Robertson. Vergara’s gimlet-eyed images reveal the buildings from virtually every conceivable angle, perspective, and distance, in nearly every weather condition, at every time of day, and ultimately, from construction through destruction. They capture the buildings’ singularity, their role in the greater ensemble of lower Manhattan, their monumentality, their surprising delicacy. They illuminate the architects’ and engineers’ work in all its daring and complexity. Perhaps above all, these photographs communicate the unforgettable contribution the Twin Towers made to a neighborhood, a skyline, and a nation.

View of the Manhattan skyline from the Ellis Island Ferry, 1992. © C Vergara

View of the World Trade Center Towers from Exchange Place in Jersey City, New Jersey, February 1977. © C Vergara

View of the World Trade Center Towers from Exchange Place in Jersey City, New Jersey, July 4, 1978. © C Vergara

View of Lower Manhattan form the Statue of Liberty ferry, 1992 © C Vergara

 

We have long admired Vergara’s work, but since the tragic events of September 11, 2001, our response to these particular photographs has been forever altered. As we worked with these images, we at the Museum came to grasp more fully the Twin Towers’ physical size, their symbolic resonance, and ultimately, the magnitude of their loss. In time, we began to comprehend - and accept as real - an event that seems to defy comprehension and reality. In this sense, the presentation of this exhibition has had a restorative dimension. And perhaps that reveals one of the reasons why we embarked on this exhibition in the first place. We believe that by presenting Vergara’s photographs, we are participating in a collective process of healing. —Susan Henshaw Jones, President, National Building Museum 

Sponsors

The exhibition catalog is co-published by the National Building Museum and Princeton Architectural Press.

The exhibition is supported by the Museum’s F. Stuart Fitzpatrick Memorial Exhibition Fund.

Credits

Guest Curator: Thomas Mellins