By Jakob Schiller
The attacks on 9/11 hit Mike Peters hard. He knew people who died. As a kid he’d watched the towers go up (he’s now 53) and was always fascinated with their size and the way they loomed over the rest of the city. To see the towers crumble seemed impossible.
As a type of therapy, he started taking photos of people in and around New York City and the nearby New Jersey towns where he grew up and still lives. At first there was no theme, but making photos was a release valve.
“With the project I was just trying to figure what it meant for that to happen,” Peters says. “I was thinking about how we reacted to 9/11 as a country.”
Eventually, the photos started to coalesce visually as a sort of localized ethnological portrait of a post-9/11 world. Like a visual poem, the photos don’t make any direct statements, but deepen with the context.
Over the course of 10 years, Peters shot various places and events, including the 9/11 memorial, Coney Island, a July 4th parade, and the Occupy Wall street protests. He titled it The Dream. For him the photos point to an updated, more realistic version of what the contemporary American Dream might be.
More>>
