After 9/11.

After 9/11 by Nathan Lyons Yale University Press, 2003/176 pp.

In his new book, After 9/11, veteran photographer (and this journal's founding father) Nathan Lyons turns his camera to the expressive visual outpouring made by Americans following the tragic events of September 11th. In a carefully sequenced collection of 151 uncaptioned black and white photographs, Lyons shows, in predominantly medium close-up shots, American flags, scrawled graffiti, religious knick-knacks, and kitschy cultural ephemera as they appear on unpeopled streets--plastered to phonebooths, chalked on walls, meticulously arranged in storefront windows. The relentless repetition of stars, bars, and other motifs is as dizzying as the multitude of meanings they come to assume. With focused honesty, Lyons's collection testifies to a national, post-traumatic response both complex and conflicted--more so, certainly, than either an ardent patriot or an unsympathetic cultural critic would be willing to acknowledge.

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In his previous works, Notations in Passing and Riding First Class on the Titanicl, Lyons built upon the tradition of Robert Frank's The Americans by carefully sequencing photographs so that visual juxtapositions could uncover cultural ironies while simultaneously revealing the casual, doomed beauty inherent in the American quotidian. In his afterword to Titanicl, Leroy F. Searle likened the effect of Lyons's sequencing to the unfolding of archaeological strata, whose layers spoke in a kind of polyphonic narrative. This effect is nowhere as pronounced as in After 9/11, whose chapters argue tirelessly back and forth even while echoing each other, forcing the viewer to question assumptions even as he finds them reinforced.

The shades of difference that Lyons captures are subtle yet significant. In one of the collection's opening images, the creases in a crisp flag with a "Relief Fund" flier taped to it are poignant in their freshly-unfolded hurry, while similar wrinkles in a limp, satiny flag--blanched by light and occupying a window with a "FOR LEASE" sign in it--make the banner appear sapped of meaning, open to the high-bidder's suggestion. Within individual photographs, too, Lyons reveals thematic tensions like layers of strata, often by focusing attention on the material base of ubiquitous flags and slogans. In one starkly lit photograph, the bubbles of air where an anti-war sticker remains unsmoothed, coupled with the scratch marks where someone attempted to claw it off the wall, are as significant as its mass-produced message.

In a loose sense, the arrangement of images in After 9/11 represents a psychologically chronological approach to trauma, a progression from suffering and humility to righteous anger. The reproduced faces of individual victims and scrawled pleas for international solidarity are more prevalent early-on in the sequence, while increasingly disturbing capitalistic and religious ironies temper the latter half. A long list of Japanese electronic brands painted on a window visually mimics the stripes of the flag in one late photograph, while George W. Bush's looming, televised face forms an Ironic diptych with a similarly composed image of a makeshift religious shrine in another.

Ultimately, Lyons is as wary of the blind mass-reproduction of image and message as he is of empty signification. In After 9/11's final image, an anti-war poster invokes sheep to ridicule blind American patriotism, but its background of incessant sloganeering ("No War on Iraq / No More Blood For Oil / No War on Iraq") demands ironic attention. Throughout After 9/11 it is the revelation of personal details that becomes the most affecting and, in a national sense, the most heartening. As Lyons's photograph of individual post-it notes, haphazardly taking the shape of an American flag on a "Where were you on 9/11?" bulletin board, suggests, America's strength lies where difference and unity are allowed to coexist.

With his enviable eye, Lyons wrestles with many of the same issues that have plagued American cultural critics since De Toc-queville, from the pitfalls of capitalism to the slippery boundaries between patriotism and nationalism. If in certain respects "everything changed after 9/11," the torrent of confusion and conflicted feeling the day has provoked is not wholly new. With his perceptive gaze and careful attention to sequencing, Nathan Lyons has realized a work whose critical and celebratory function is as complex and ambiguous as America itself.