25 February 2002

American Official Comments on Launch of September 11 Photo Exhibit

Washington -- A photo exhibit commemorating the recent terrorist attacks on America will soon be sent overseas to tour the world for three years.

The exhibit, called "September 11: Images From Ground Zero," will be launched in London on March 5 and will be shown at around the same time in Manila, Abuja (Nigeria), Dar es Salaam, Rome, Islamabad, Rabat, Paris, Istanbul, Nairobi, Moscow, Damascus, Mexico City, and Kuwait. In all, 26 sets of the exhibit will be sent on tour.

Speaking to the Washington File in her State Department office on February 25, Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA) Patricia Harrison discussed the exhibit, which is a project very dear to her heart. In addition to being responsible for it, she also has the challenging job of directing the bureau that organizes the international exchange of tens of thousands of professors, students, and artists.

Harrison described the photo exhibit's 27 still shots by New York photographer Joel Meyerowitz as "quite dramatic" and emotionally stirring. Some, she said, are even graphic, showing wounded rescuers coping with the damage caused by self-proclaimed Muslim extremists who dove two hijacked airliners into the twin World Trade Center towers in Manhattan, killing more than 2,800 people, many of them foreigners.

Meyerowitz, whose award-winning artistry has solidified his reputation as a "street photographer" of renown, like Henri Cartier-Bresson, caught the agonizing first days and weeks of rescue, the recovery of bodies, and the demolition and excavation of the World Trade Center towers.

The photos provide an important historical service, Harrison said, not only because they document the aftermath of the attacks but also because they remind their audience of the results of terrorism. "Twenty-three countries have decided this is important enough to have requested the exhibit. After all, there are people who don't believe this [terrorist attack] happened," she added.

President Bush named Harrison, the co-founder of a public relations firm and former co-chairman of the Republican Party, to head ECA just three weeks after the attacks. That same year the bureau, whose 300 employees administer a budget of $415 million, including the world-famous Fulbright Scholars program, arranged 35,000 individual American and foreign visitor exchanges.

"You know, when the idea of a photo exhibit was first proposed I was very excited," Harrison told the Washington File. "I grew up in New York, and a girl I went to high school with, whom I'd not seen in 20 years, e-mailed me to say her daughter had been killed in the attacks."

Within an hour of the attacks in New York, another group of terrorists slammed their hijacked aircraft into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the U.S. military, located just across the Potomac River from Washington. In that assault, more than 180 people, including all the aircraft's crew and passengers, were killed. Harrison pointed out that among those killed was her close friend, lawyer and media commentator Barbara Olsen.

Terrorists commandeered a fourth aircraft that crashed into the Pennsylvania countryside after the passengers put up a fight. Many believe that aircraft was bound for Washington, where the Capitol and even the White House could have been targets.

"I think terrorism is something we can't turn our back on, no matter where we live," Harrison said. "It is a cancer and it won't go away by being ignored." In a way the exhibit acts as a new call to world citizenship, she added. "For those of us who are parents, we would like to eradicate it so it doesn't have to fall to our children or grandchildren to do it."

At the ECA bureau, Harrison said, "we all wanted to do something over and above what we do here on a daily basis, so we designed this commemoration as a cultural exhibit that will work on several levels as it eventually travels to 60 cities around the world. First, many people have not seen the record of destruction of the World Trade Center, and the venue for the exhibit will be museums that are accessible by the vast majority of people."

Secondly, she said, U.S. embassies will complement the shows "by providing opportunities for dialogue through seminars and discussions."

Since World Trade Center victims came from more than 80 nations, Harrison said, "the overarching theme of the photo exhibit is that terrorism is barbarism -- whether we are talking about the victims who were murdered on September 11, whether we're talking about [fellow New Yorker and slain Wall Street Journal reporter] Daniel Pearl."

This terrorism is "a global scourge," Harrison noted, "and not just something the United States has to worry about. It impacts people who are just intent on going about their daily lives. That's why I think this particular exhibit is important. Because, in all its drama, it really underscores that point."

September 11 is now a date that for many Americans rivals the December 7 (1941) surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the event that brought the United States into World War II.

Exactly three months after the attacks, President Bush told the world: "In time, perhaps, we will mark the memory of September 11 in stone and metal, something we can show children as yet unborn to help them understand what happened on this minute and on this day. But for those of us who lived through these events, the only marker we'll ever need is the tick of a clock at the 46th minute of the eighth hour of the 11th day."