The growing scholarly field of 9/11 studies has recast our understanding of the relation between representation and terror, and Jennifer Good offers a partly uneven, but thought-provoking, synthesis of the key concepts trauma, memory and spectacle. Photography and September 11th engages with existing scholarship by Barbie Zelizer (2002) or Susan Lurie (2006) on the photographic record of September 11th, but shifts the debate when it evaluates the role of photography in the terrorist aftermath with much greater scepticism.Footnote ¹ Good argues that photography was complicit in the power structures of the media and the events’ traumatic impact. Particularly notable is Good's skilful negotiation of a Foucauldian understanding of power, psychoanalysis, and concepts of invisibility and overvisibility, which leads her to develop an efficient theoretical frame for her contentions on the haunting relation between spectacle and trauma. Based, as these are, on photographic analyses that are limited in detail and critical scope, Good's broad argument at times lacks anchorage in its vast photographic corpus and, in consequence, touches only tangentially on some of the finer challenges of the complex issues at hand.

Good begins her argument with a first chapter on spectacle and collective memory, and discusses the homogenization of the photographic record through prevalent tropes of communal shock, heroism, and the aesthetics of restored order. A critical sensitivity to the tension between the emotive power of photography on the one hand, and critical reflection on the other hand, is one of the strong points of the book in general; here, it enables acute insights into the normative elements of portrayals of eyewitnesses. One central focus of enquiry is the trauma of photographic seeing, topic of the second chapter but a pervasive theme throughout the study. Any discussion of collective trauma harbours ethical as well as psychosocial challenges, and Good is rightly cautious about the overuse of victimhood as a category. The thesis that 9/11 did indeed constitute a trauma based on the visual rests on the impact that images had on global spectators’ experience of “presence,” and on the repeated exposure to images of the seemingly unspeakable. Good draws back on the concept of invisibility to offer an insightful commentary on viewing images of the towers collapsing, understood as an experience of frustrated empathy with the hidden terror of those inside. However, neither of the trauma theories with which Good engages, those of Lacan and Freud, focus enough on the visual to truly validate the claim that this constitutes not just a shocked awareness of vulnerability, but a form of trauma in its own right. While the argument for a structural affinity between traumatic flashback and photographic exposure certainly convinces, open questions remain about the conceptual leap from this trigger to universalizing a traumatic pathology in a highly heterogeneous set of spectators. This is a fascinating path for future enquiry, and Good's consideration of empathy already directs scholarly attention towards affect theory as a possible field for this.

The chapter that follows, “Buildings Made Flesh,” engages with the tendency to substitute architectural ruins for injured human bodies in 9/11 photography. Referring again to psychoanalysis, Good demonstrates how the Freudian uncanny, or “unhomely,” can shed new light on images such as Richard Drew's Falling Man. Good succeeds in transforming this marginal principle of psychoanalysis into an evocative frame for understanding contemporary global terrorism, and pits the precariousness of human beings against the failed promise of technological stability. Good concludes her study discussing the patterns of agency and control involved in creating a collective memory out of the vast photographic archive. What is at stake here is the crisis of truth in the aftermath, and the final chapters offer a disillusioned, yet incisive, account of seemingly democratic remembrance efforts in a Web-based present. This Foucauldian take on amateur photography, and on appropriations of media imagery, is a sharp-witted meta-commentary on remembrance cultures and related criticism alike. Even if some claims here warrant a more thorough quantitative (and discursive) analysis to be become fully convincing, this take on the almost obsessive documentary drive in the face of terror, which continues in the wake of the Paris attacks (2015), is a provocative read for students and scholars of memory culture.

Photography and September 11th shows how a multidimensional enquiry into visual culture can help disentangle the knot of emotive memory and ideological leverage in the aftermath of terrorist strategies which make the media complicit in furthering its message. It calls for a follow-up, defining collective trauma in visual culture, or an enquiry into those tropes of death or unrelieved suffering which remain invisible. This is valuable reading for anyone interested in the difficult questions it raises about the psychological impact of the photography of terror.