Street memorials

Weeks after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, photos of the missing cling to the walls, lampposts, fences and kiosks around lower Manhattan. Commemorative candles, flowers and toys adorn the makeshift shrines erected outside local firehouses and hospitals.

But these important symbols of American resolve will, ultimately, vanish, stripped away by the elements as winter closes in on the Big Apple.

That’s why UUPer Bruce Jackson, a distinguished professor of American culture at SUNY Buffalo, made the trek — and took hundreds of photographs of these fleeting street memorials.

“There were formal utterances by the president, the mayor and the governor,” Jackson said. “But these are transient, yet important, expressions of grief and commonality. ... This is one way people talk with other people they would never meet but had to say something anyway.”

Sixty of Jackson’s color photos were exhibited in October on the Mainstage Wall in the Atrium of the university’s Center for the Arts. One will be part of a 40-photographer exhibit at the George Eastman House in Rochester; dozens more may be housed in a special collection by the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

“For outsiders, New York is a monolith, unknowable, a monster. For people who live there, New York City is neighborhoods,” he said.

Jackson had this to say about his photograph of the replica towers erected in Union Square, top left: “The towers are 32 toy license plates high. That’s 768 nameplates. Each plate has a name — Angel, Jose, Nick, Sandra ... There was nothing around them. What could you add to two towers with all those names? All those names.”

All Jackson’s photographs were taken Sept. 23 in Union Square and in the West Village.

To view more commemorative photos, go to Jackson’s Web site at http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~bjackson/missingpersons.html.

— Karen L. Mattison