melissa shook

About Flagging Spirits

On the morning of September 11, 2001, a friend from the dog park called, “Turn on your TV.” I did and saw the second plane hit the World Trade Center. For days, I watched the same images over and over, talked to friends and replied to e-mails.

While I didn’t know anyone personally who died in the attacks, one friend knew the pilot from Dracut, another often stayed in the Greenwich Village apartment of someone working in the Tower that morning. There was no way of getting away from the grief and shock, not even in sleep when nightmares of planes crashing into buildings dogged me.

When Sally Stein wrote from L.A. that she’d photographed a guy, probably an illegal immigrant, selling American flags on the median strip when she was driving, I began to think about the endless flags that suddenly had appeared everything – car bumpers, pickup trucks, apartment windows, lawns, in stores of Vietnamese and Hispanic shopkeepers, on lapels. I wanted to tag along on her impulse, to document this remarkable display of flags. Yes, they were displays of patriotism, but their ubiquitous presence went deeper than that. Many seemed indicators of class, others to act as talismans for worried immigrants, hoping to display their fidelity to America and protect themselves, their families and their goods.

I saw 9/11 as an attack on us, on America, but I also thought of it in context of the more complex, deep rooted and long-term policy that the U. S. had toward the Middle East and oil consumption. I knew that Sally would be photographing with that in mind.

It would have been easier, perhaps better, had we agreed to produce an exhibition. Instead, I suggested the Internet as most contemporary and potentially practical tool of communication, one that would allow us to reach a larger audience. We could upload the images and link to other sites or blog discussions and to articles that focused on American foreign policy. I never wanted to lose sight of the tragic loss of lives, but I always thought the issues were far more complex than often discussed in popular media and certainly than photographs could show.

Unfortunately, I knew virtually nothing about setting up a website. But Margaret Wagner Hart did. She taught digital art in the same department at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Not only does she have the skills that I needed, but she’s energetic and optimistic. I’ve never seen her get angry which, once the project grew into it’s final form, was a tremendous asset. Though I helped with Dream Weaver, she really did the bulk of the work. And there was a lot of it, a lot of images, a lot of pages, a lot of back and forth.

There is a thick archive of e-mails documenting the growth of this project – from two people, to three, and so on into a site that contained photographs of flag displays from different parts of the country and represented very different viewpoints.

In large part it was my fault that we never added links that would have added a richer dimension to the site. I was too busy to locate them or to push for someone else to take on this task. I don’t know who in our group really shared my opinion that photographs aren’t effective without text or context, but I never thought a site of flag images was truly worth the trouble.

Am I glad that flaggingspirits existed? Probably not. It was a lot of work and didn’t have the political dimension that I’d envisioned. I got caught up in wanting to produce twelve months of images for the site, lost site of my goals. But, even though I regret that it wasn’t a more effective, politically insightful piece, I won’t ever forget particular images, for instance the sheer number and beauty of all the motorcycles parked outside of a millennium hotel in New York as their riders readied for the next leg of their September 2001 commemorative ride to the field in Pennsylvania, then onto Washington, D.C.

Undoubtedly my thoughts about our collective project, flaggingspirit, are colored by the war in Iraq. Many of us marched against it, carrying flags as well as protest posters, but with little belief that Congress would hold out for more proof that weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq. 9/11 primed this country for the letting of blood in the guise of the war on terror. I understand why that was an initial response to experiencing shocking loss of life and destruction here, but only now is it more widely accepted that information that lead to approving of this invasion was systematically manipulated by those in the White House who came into power with an agenda already in place.

ps, Two excellent photographers who are also friends were important to the project. One is Marion Faller who lives in Buffalo, New York, and the other is Karl Baden who lives in Cambridge, MA. (See www.CoveringPhotography.com for one of his on-going projects.)