Leo Rubinfien witnessed the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 from his own terrace in lower Manhattan. As traumatic as it was to experience the event so closely, it took many months for Rubinfien to formulate his response to the experience and years to develop this response into his book Wounded Cities (Steidl, 2008). The photographs come from more than 20 cities that have been struck by significant terror attacks in recent years. Eyemazing met with Rubinfien in San Francisco.

As an introduction to the project, Rubinfien explained:

Leo Rubinfien: I think in the United States we like to imagine that September 11 was unique, but events like it have really been going on all over the world for quite some time. I spent the months afterward walking, standing on street corners, looking at people around me and wondering, who are you…who are you? Do you fear what I fear? What do you want? Later, I began to photograph people as if the pictures might contain clues or answers to the questions I had. They couldn’t, of course, but the work still seemed to express the wish that they could. For Wounded Cities I visited places that had experienced terror back as far as the early 1990s, but there are no pictures of victims. Few of the pictures come from specific sites of violence. These are all ordinary people. Everyone is a potential victim but there’s no way to know more than that.

Heather Snider: In Wounded Cities you write about how you and your family were living very close to the World Trade Center on September 11. Can you describe your personal experience of that morning?

LR: I was close to what happened but I don’t want to suggest that that was exceptional. I was just nearby; it happened in my neighbourhood. Many people were much closer. One remarkable aspect of terror attacks is that you can be just a short distance away and see a horrible thing happening in front of your nose, yet still be safe. I was working at my desk when I heard the terrible noise of the first plane coming downtown over Tribeca. It was very low and moving very fast, making a roaring, shrieking sound. I went out and watched, thinking it must have a mechanical problem and that the pilot was trying to reach the harbour. Then, astonishingly, it went directly into the building before me. For a year afterward I was in despair and didn’t believe I could do anything with photography in response to what had happened. I didn’t think photographing the ruins, or the victims, would tell me anything.

HS: What were you doing in your photography just previous to this event and were you able to continue with it, or did everything change at that moment?

LR: I was working on a book that the attacks made me set aside, though now I’m ready to return to it. That book was based on my belief—not far from a feeling many people had in the 1990s—that we were in a new era in which the world was knitting itself together happily, prosperously, peacefully. But after September 11 all that seemed appallingly simple to me. The whole story of globalisation is far more mysterious and complicated and darker than I’d realised.

What we experienced in 2001 was a form of warfare, of course, and the unusual thing was that it had burst in on people who hadn’t thought they were at war. The sudden intrusion of war into the peace in which we were used to living was utterly shocking. It gave people a mental wound that was perhaps even more profound than the physical damage. It would drive our actions on every level—personal, political—and it would last a very long time. So the question for me was how to photograph when photographs only show surfaces, and can’t describe an inner wound. For a year I was stuck, but then, in 2002, I was in Tokyo when the first Bali bombings occurred. The people around me seemed to take them very hard. They’d had the Aum Shinrikyo attacks in the 1990s, and the Kuta Beach bombings brought the emotion of those days back in an instant. I began to see that everything you cannot tell, looking at a person, is no less interesting than what you think you can tell, and so I began to see how to do this book.

HS: This idea of culling the mood of a people, taken unaware from a public space is reminiscent of Walker Evans’ subway photographs…

LR: Evans, along with August Sander, is very important to me, but unlike the Evans subway subjects, most of the Wounded Cities people knew they were being photographed, and much of the emotion you see in them comes out of that.

HS: When you started this body of work, was your intention so clearly defined, that you would go to places that have experienced significant terrorist events, and then look for the impact, if any, in the faces of the population? Or did your theme emerge as you were working?

LR: I knew I’d go to cities that had been attacked, but the project grew deeper as I worked. The first picture I knew was strong was of a girl on the street in Japan (Tokyo, 2002, at Shibuya Station). There was a strangeness to the encounter—between me, between the viewer, and her. She is an interesting and odd-looking girl by herself, OK, but there was also her suspicion of the person looking at her, and that quality seemed to be expressed not only by her eyes but by her blanched face and uncanny orange hair and other things too, as if she’d been shocked into looking as she looked. When I saw this I thought yes, this has the “skewed-ness” of the world I’m in now and I could see the path I wanted to go down.

HS: And if this was your starting point, where was your ending point?

LR: In Palestinian Hebron, earlier this year, on the last of 15 or 20 trips I made for the project. Hebron has experienced freelance violence for 100 years. The most famous event was in 1994, when a Jewish doctor murdered many Muslim men who were praying in the shared mosque-synagogue at the core of the city. But smaller brutalities have taken place almost continually.

HS: How was working on this project different from other work you have done? There seems to be a moral passion behind this work…

LR: I was aware of something like that. The first thing I was, after the attacks, was furious: outraged that this could have been done, not just to my family, my city, but also to all those individuals. A person who detonates a bomb in a crowd makes people out to be representatives of an idea, not the unique, private beings that they are. This abstracting, this erasure of the individuality of people that was implicit in the attacks was unbearable to me. Wounded Cities says over and over again: look at this person. There’s a fierce insistence on the individuality of the people throughout it.

HS: You combine both black and white and colour in Wounded Cities, how did this dual approach unfold?

LR: For many years I’d photographed mostly in colour, but something about this subject made black and white more appropriate. Initially I thought the ratio would be 50/50, but as I progressed, the question was whether to keep the colour work at all, when 90 percent of the best pictures were in black and white. But in assembling the book I liked the way the colour disrupted the picture sequence. Just when you felt you knew what was happening, a colour picture would knock you out of that, and remind you how subjective the pictures, the writing, really were—that every picture represented just a way of seeing, a way of asking.

HS: There is a statement you made in the foreword of your previous book, A Map of the East, that your work might “be difficult for [the person] who looks for a picture’s stylistic response to whatever happened last year in the world of art.” Though I agree with you that this is true in your photography, your position is intriguing considering that you are not only an artist but also a well known writer and critic actively engaged in the art world. How do you keep these sides of yourself distinct, or do you?

LR: I’ve never written about the art world. Only about art, and only a little of it. I’m not a critic. I like writing about how pictures strike me. A real critic has an interest in how a given field is developing, but I’ve never been like that. I’ve tried to say what I was trying to understand about certain photographers, in the course of doing my work as one. All artists, whether they articulate it or not, are constantly in private dialogue with work by others, looking and thinking and figuring out why the object here touches them more than the one over there. I’ve simply tried to convey how that dialogue runs in my own mind.

HS: You were a friend and admirer of Garry Winogrand at an earlier time in your life. Do you wonder what he would think about the Wounded Cities?

LR: It would make me happy if he said “good job,” I suppose, but I don’t think about it. I’ve taken this project as far as I can. There not much more I can do, it’s done, it is what I lived through, or near enough, and there’s little there that could usefully be changed. There’s nothing phoney in it.

HS: In Wounded Cities you say that what the world has been caught up in recently is not war, but a state in which war and peace go on at the same time, and in which the peace blinds you to the extent of the violence that’s also going on. After spending so much time investigating this idea, and looking at the spirit of people in the street, do you see our world moving towards peace or war?

LR: I’m not a political analyst. I respond to the world too impressionistically to be one. So while there’s a lot about politics in the book, it’s always with the aim of discovering how large events strike upon the life of an ordinary person. The book’s subject is how phenomena like September 11 invade our private lives. I don’t want to speak of where we are going, or how we should behave, or what we should do—there are professionals who know more about that than I’ll ever know. I greatly admire the logical abilities of real analysts. I can only evoke what a few of the conundrums by which we are trapped feel like.

I’ve never been much of a political person and even less a political artist. The book is concerned with political events for how they bend the lives of individual people. In the end, they are what fascinate me. It is a real issue, though, for Americans, that for decades our government has committed warlike acts without our quite knowing it. On one hand, our officials often prefer not to talk about them; on the other, we haven’t wanted to know. We haven’t wanted the responsibility. And so our country has done much damage while turning its eyes away from its own hands. I’m not sure this is something we can safely continue to do. It seems difficult to sleep as we have in the past.