"The World Trade Center: Before Memory" Photography Exhibition

HKI Gallery presents The World Trade Center: Before Memory, an exhibition of black-and-white photographs by Hong Kong artist Gretchen So. Made on medium-format film in the early 1990s, the work returns viewers to a time when the Twin Towers were still part of the ordinary landscape of New York.

Rather than presenting the World Trade Center primarily as an architectural landmark or monumental presence, So photographed the towers from streets, bridges, waterfronts and other public spaces across the city and beyond Manhattan. Their familiar outlines recur throughout the series: sometimes commanding attention, sometimes receding quietly into the distance, and rarely becoming the sole subject of the photograph. The towers appear as witnesses to the everyday life of metropolitan New York.

      “When I took these photographs, I was simply observing what was around
me,” says So. “There was no intention to memorialize anything. Yet the Twin Towers kept appearing somewhere in the frame. They were not necessarily the subject, but they were part of the rhythm of the city and woven into the everyday lives of the people who lived there.”

A decade later came the September 11 attacks. So was then studying Arts Administration at Columbia University and experienced firsthand the profound impact the event had on New York. Reviewing the negatives twenty-five years later, she realized that the project had acquired meanings she could never have anticipated when the photographs were made. Images originally intended as documentation of urban life had also become records of a moment in history.

      “What the photographs show is as powerful as the absence we feel today,”
she adds.

Although photographed in New York, the series extends beyond the story of a single city. It reflects a concern that has shaped So’s work for more than three decades: the
relationship between people and urban space. The photographs hold a city at a particular moment in time while revealing how our understanding of a place can be transformed by the passage of time and the course of history.

The photographs have not changed. History has, and so has the way we see them.