Roberta Galler: A 9/11 Graphic Memoir
This was a project for a Graphic Memoir course I took with Prof. Laura Wexler. It is based on transcripts of interviews with Roberta Galler, a witness of the World Trade Center attack.
In the interviews, Roberta Galler tells us of her early traumatic memories, and how she re-experienced them through the trauma of 9/11; her childhood memories of contracting and recovering from polio, anti-semitism in the South, and her internalization as a child of other people’s memories of the war and Holocaust. In her interview, Galler goes back and forth between her past and more recent memories. To recreate my own experience reading her interviews, I made cyanotypes with layered images and kept the pages unbound. The layering and repetition signify the seeming disorder of memory.
The unbound pages mimic Galler’s nonlinear narrative and the fragmentation of her memory. Much of Galler’s narrative is about movement--from home to home, and place to place. For the reader, there is a physical moving of the pages. Although there is an initial order to the pages, the reader can easily reorder them.
As photographs, cyanotypes are “memories” of the objects or images placed on the paper. They are ghost images of a particular time and place. The results are unpredictable--vulnerable to the changing light. Cyanotypes also reference blueprints, a method of recording information. Memoirs are often personal memories or stories; while imperfect, they are a record of someone’s subjective experiences and their need to tell. They show what the person saw.
Most of the images are blueprints and maps of the World Trade Center, Auschwitz, Warm Springs, and Cooks County Hospital. These are the places of Galler's memories. They represent the structuring and collapse of some of these places, as well as Galler’s life and homes. While creating this work, it felt strange looking at blueprints of places that no longer exist. They are powerfully symbolic of the physical place and everything about the place that goes beyond the physical. Perhaps blueprints and maps here help us to make some sense of the incomprehensible.
The unbound pages mimic Galler’s nonlinear narrative and the fragmentation of her memory. Much of Galler’s narrative is about movement--from home to home, and place to place. For the reader, there is a physical moving of the pages. Although there is an initial order to the pages, the reader can easily reorder them.
As photographs, cyanotypes are “memories” of the objects or images placed on the paper. They are ghost images of a particular time and place. The results are unpredictable--vulnerable to the changing light. Cyanotypes also reference blueprints, a method of recording information. Memoirs are often personal memories or stories; while imperfect, they are a record of someone’s subjective experiences and their need to tell. They show what the person saw.
Most of the images are blueprints and maps of the World Trade Center, Auschwitz, Warm Springs, and Cooks County Hospital. These are the places of Galler's memories. They represent the structuring and collapse of some of these places, as well as Galler’s life and homes. While creating this work, it felt strange looking at blueprints of places that no longer exist. They are powerfully symbolic of the physical place and everything about the place that goes beyond the physical. Perhaps blueprints and maps here help us to make some sense of the incomprehensible.