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Here is New York was founded in response to the events of September 11, and to the flood of images that resulted from it. The idea was simple: to present images of the event by as many different people and from as many different perspectives as possible. In the days following September 11, the organizers asked for pictures and were inundated with slides, negatives, prints, and digital files from photographers of every description, not only top photojournalists and other professionals, but rescue workers, firemen, police officers, school children, and amateurs of every kind. In order to underline that it was the images themselves that mattered, rather than their makers, the photographs were all digitally scanned, printed out in exactly the same format, and hung from wires without attribution or frames in a Soho storefront in downtown Manhattan.

The book Here is New York will be the most comprehensive and authentic document of what occurred. It will bear witness to what seemed unimaginable, memorialize the people who perished and the rescue workers who served so heroically. Most of all, the book will be a testimony of people speaking directly to each other about their fears, their emotions, and their desire for community. This desire is one of the strongest by-products of the horrible events of September 11. It is also what distinguishes Here is New York from any and all other books about the event.

Proceeds from the sale of the images and the book benefit The Children’s Aid Society’s WTC Relief Fund. To date, Here Is New York has donated over $600,000.00 to the Society. The democratic nature of the exhibiton has allowed it to expand to simultaneous exhibitions including shows at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, Chicago; and The Daytona Beach Community College’s Southeast Museum of Photography. To continue to express the magnitude of this event and expound upon the democratic message of this project, exhibitions will be mounted simultaneously throughout the world this summer and fall to memorialize September 11th. The exhibitions will open in London, Tokyo, Zurich, Arles, as well as several other American locations including Washington, D.C. The pictures communicate where words are insufficient, each tells one part of this tragic story.

The Here Is New York exhibition has been featured in all of the major New York newspapers and by many local and national television networks, including CBS, PBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, and National Geographic, Oprah Winfrey, Rosie O’Donnell, Dateline, and 60 Minutes . International press from the following countries have covered the exhibition: the United Kingdom, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, The Netherlands, and Japan. The book Here is New York will receive extensive press coverage as well.

Editorial Reviews

On September 25, 2001, an exhibition opened in a previously vacant storefront in SoHo, perhaps 20 blocks from Ground Zero. Photographer Peress, who had been photographing the city for the New Yorker, Michael Shulan (who owned the building where the exhibit started) and two friends decided to hang pictures of the city by anybody and everybody who submitted them. The exhibition attracted thousands of submissions, and many thousands more visitors, and has toured in the U.S. and Europe, including stops at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery. The slip-cased, 12″ 8 1/4″ book presents 720 color and 160 duotone (and mostly full-page) portraits of the city in crisis, with crisp printing and no captions. While many of the images may resemble those seen repeatedly over the past year, this assemblage feels direct without being voyeuristic. If it is heavy on the flags, it is because the city was festooned at the time, and the pictures convey an array of different responses, personal and political, to the tragedy. This book really does, in Whitman’s words, contain multitudes. – Publishers Weekly

This book grew out of an exhibit and sale of photographs of the September 11, 2001, World Trade Center disaster. The exhibit began when Michael Shulan taped a photograph of the towers in a vacant Soho shop window. A friend encouraged him to post more photos and on September 25 the gallery opened for a supposed three-week run. Months and thousands of pictures later, the project included a Web site and the publication of this book. Like the show itself, this book contains pages of uncaptioned photographs, almost 1000 of the more than 5000 photos submitted by some 3000 photographers. “Anybody and everybody” brought photos; those chosen for publication were selected “to give the most coherent sense of the whole.” The book opens with approximately 170 black-and-white photos; the hundreds that follow are in color. The pictures vary in composition, in viewpoint, and both in camera angle and type of equipment used. Some are macabre, some eerie, some border on the tasteless, and a few are beautiful. The book concludes with the most breathtaking and evocative piece in the entire collection-a two-page color photo of the upper reaches of the Twin Towers thrusting upward through a sea of clouds.
Dori DeSpain, Fairfax County Public Library, VA for School Library Journal

Review

This is it. At this writing (August 26 2002),
“Here is New York” is the book that best
captures the 9/11 attack on the U.S. at
the World Trade Center and the immediate
and ongoing effects on those of us in New York City.

This book is not a souvenir.
It is not an editorial summary.
It is not an exploitation.

It is shattered glimpses of the reality
that we New Yorkers lived, simply presented.
This is what was and is.

Except for an introduction describing how
the photographs were collected, the entire
book is just photographs. Just photographs.
And the book is as thick as a Manhattan phone
book.

Each photograph is given an entire page or
double page spread. Each is meticulously
reproduced so that you can study the details
of what is going on. You can read the faces
of people in them. There are no captions.
The photos speak for themselves. Virtually
every one of them is profound.

After all, there really are no words for this.

Look at the details. There are no ordinary
photographs here. If you think a photograph
is ordinary,you are missing something important;
look again.

There are nearly a thousand photographs, most
never before published. They communicate an
intimacy of meaning that I have seen no where
else. The whole project is stunning; the order
and format of the photographs in this book
offer a depth of experience that cannot be
duplicated in other media.

Please know: the wreckage photographs are the
best I’ve seen, yet even at the size of a full
page they cannot convey the scale and depth and
constant danger of “Ground Zero.”

There was far more going on than even this city
full of cameras could capture. Some still goes on.
And much is still going on inside ourselves.
No book, no media, can bring it all together.
But this book is more than a sum of its parts
and delivers more than I thought possible.

I offer my highest praise.

Indeed, here is New York, U.S.A.

- A Customer, Amazon.Com Customer Review

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