Multimedia Gallery: Four Years Later - 9/11 Commemoration

A little over a month ago I went to photograph the commemoration event of the attacks on the World Trade Center at Ground Zero.

I arrived at Ground Zero at 07:30 a.m. on the morning of September 11th and stayed until 11:00 p.m. Not to photograph the official ceremony where about 640 siblings of those who died read the names of the 2.749 victims but to photograph the people who came to Lower Manhattan to mourn and remember.
It was an intense and from time to time touching day. This gallery might seem a little pathetic but that's how I experienced this day.

In addition to taking photographs I also recorded sound with my little Mini Disc player. It was not the first time I recorded sound but it's the first time I actually use it. Inspired by Magnum In Motion, MSNBC, The New York Times and some other websites who already build multimedia galleries for certain topics and stories, combining photographs with sound, I decided that it's time for me to do the same thing. I just think that sound and in this case original sound recorded the same day and the same place adds another dimension to a set of photographs.

I had to learn how to use sound editing software and had a hard time to tune the sound for the photographs. But the biggest part of the work for this multimedia gallery did a great friend of mine...
To make this project happen I needed somebody to help me out with the Flash programming. Me and Flash... Forget it. As so often my friend agreed to help me out and not only build the Flash file for it but he build a template which I can easily use again for other multimedia stories without the need to programm in Flash. Man, thanks a lot for this!

The complete feature takes 5 minutes and 32 seconds to view. If you do not have Flash installed or have a very slow internet connection you are also able to view the photographs as an HTML gallery by following the link at the bottom of the pop up.
Any comments and feedback on this multimedia gallery are highly appreciated. To see the other galleries I created (without sound) check out the Photosets section.

Posted by Martin Fuchs at 10:38 PM | Comments (10)

An American Flag on City Island in the Bronx

Not quite as nice as the one from yesterday but still another one for my collection. More Flags in the archive, something else than flags tomorrow. ;-)

Posted by Martin Fuchs at 11:59 PM | Comments (1)

The Flag under a rainy sky in Williamsburg

Posted by Martin Fuchs at 11:21 PM | Comments (7)

The American Flag on cars

More for my collection of American Flags in the archive.

Posted by Martin Fuchs at 11:59 PM | Comments (1)

Carlos Arredondo - A father who lost his son in Iraq

Click image for a larger view

This image shows 45 year old Carlos Arredondo at the Anti-War March in Washington DC on September 24th. On August 26, 2004 - his 44th birthday - Mr. Arredondo was told by three Marine officers that his son, Alexander Arredondo was killed in Iraq. In that month Carlos Arredondos son just turned 20 years old.
As a reaction to this Carlos Arredondo set the Marine van on fire while he was inside and suffered severe burns. I am not going to post the whole story about what happend that day here. You can read more about it on the websites of CBS News, Not in Our Name or CNN.

Carlos Arredondo joined the Gold Star Families For Peace, an organization of families who have lost relatives in the Iraq war. From on August 15th 2005 he joined the "Bring them home now" tour to have the public remember the war.

Letter written by Alexander Arredondo to his parents - Click image for a larger view

E-Mail send to Melida Arredendo by the Army - Click image for a larger view

I met Mr. Arredondo in front of the White House where he was protesting against the war in Iray. As he was holding up a portrait of his son in uniform he dispensed an envelope containing a copy of a letter his son wrote and a copy of an e-mail which was send to Mr, Arredondos wife by the US Armed Forces.

Today someone told me that the photograph of the guy with the death-mask I posted a couple of days ago doesn't give a feeling of movement, of something else to come. "But this leaves me with something else. A dead sense of no hope and it saddens me. It is an incredibly cold feeling."
Well I'd say rightly. There is so much cruelty going on, so many people died and do still die.
But Carlos Arredondo shows a different way to go. He turns his grief into the fight against such things happening again. He sees hope and is part of a movement trying to change things.

Posted by Martin Fuchs at 10:56 PM | Comments (6)

American Flags used in diversity

And here we go again with two more photographs showing the American Flag. The first photograph shows Zegir Berisha, a native from Serbia who came to the United States 35 years ago. He has four sons who were born here. Two are Marines and two are in the Army. Although he didn't get the US citizenship because he is from Serbia as he told me, he loves America. He stand with the American people and their flag to fight terrorism.
The second image shows two women who build a rocket out of cardboard and who wear it as a penis with the American Flag on it as a form of protest against the government and the US led war.

My interest in the American way to tread their flag is still big. As an Austrian I am not used to this huge amount of patriotism. I already wrote about this in an earlier post from mid June. When I came to New York I somehow started to loosely collect photographs from the American Flag. And I still do. I realized that my collection got pretty big by now. I didn't publish most of these photographs yet but some can found in the archive and I plan to do a gallery on that in the near future.

Posted by Martin Fuchs at 11:21 PM | Comments (4)

Anti-War Protests in Washington, DC - Part III

More Anti-War Protests here and here.

Posted by Martin Fuchs at 11:13 PM | Comments (3)