The two quotes that accompany the exhibition Unheimlich Vertraut – Bilder vom Terror (« The Uncanny Familiar – Images of Terror »), featured on occasion of the 10th anniversary of New York’s terrorist attacks help to establish its time frame : On one hand, the “The games must go on!” by Avery Brundage, president of the International Olympic Committee in 1972 following the Munich attacks, on the other hand, the famous “Show you’re not afraid” by Rudolph Giulani in 2001.

The photographs featured at C/O Berlin beginning September 10th cover the decades between those two phrases. Most of them belong to the archives of the German magazine Spiegel (around 200 images) but also over thirty authors among them Thomas Hoepker, Michal Kosakowski, Dennis Adams, Thomas Galler, Thomas Ruff, Simon Menner, Pascale Couvert, Reymond Depardon and Michael Schäfer.

Some pictures are frozen in the collective memory, and they have become a visual reference when remembering, among others, the 9/11 attacks. The central idea behind C/O, which we could easily call a “family album” of images testifying the terror (we can all state, they have become familiar to us), is that the photographs, far from illustrating the events, would be able to create new realities, influencing the public opinion and also producing innumerable reactions before the facts shown.

Hence its direct transmission, the Munich attacks have for the first time produced a transformation of the terrorist act: it has become a communication strategy, turning at the same time the image into a weapon and a means in itself. Thirty years after, the New York attacks must have been the event the most photographed and filmed in the history of media. But despite the enormous number of images, ten years after just a few remain in the collective memory. They have become in turn key images, “visiotypes” that carry an unprecedented concentration of information, instantly recognizable. It is this process that tries to explore the choice of work selected at C/O Berlin: How has our perception of events and our link with press images shifted during the last few decades, and how has the media built their stories on terror through these same images.

Accompanying the exhibition, a program of conferences, appearances and films will be features, as well as a catalog by Verlag Walther Koenig publishing.

Sebastian Messina

Unheimlich Vertraut – Bilder vom Terror / The Uncanny Familiar – Images of Terror

Until 4 December 2011
C/O Berlin
Oranienburger Straße 35/36
10117 Berlin