intro
One week before September 11, 2001, Leo Rubinfien, his wife and small children moved into a new apartment next door to the World Trade Center in New York. They witnessed the violence of that day close up, fled with the evacuees and later returned to a damaged home and a city whose wounds have remained open for years. The physical destruction in Manhattan was plain to all, but Rubinfien quickly understood that the hidden "mental wound" was the more profound one, and in 2002 he began to photograph in cities around the world that had suffered severely, in recent times, from terror attacks. Over five years he would visit locations that included London, Nairobi, Kuta Beach, Moscow, Buenos Aires, Istanbul and Colombo, looking intimately at the ordinary people of those cities and searching their faces to see how the anxious air of the terror era had touched and shaped their worlds. Wounded Cities combines 60 intensely evocative photographs from this project with a memoir in which Rubinfien explores the anguish and the political passions of September 11 and its repercussions in an intimate prose style akin to his photography. The book's unusual page design--every page is a fully printed gatefold--weaves Rubinfien's words and images into one of the most original hybrid books photography has produced.
Leo Rubinfien. Wounded Cities. Steidl, 2008. ISBN: 9783865216762