Take picture now of what we have

I find this short post by Nick Paumgarten on a photographer who worked the night shift at the Twin Towers extremely touching. I come back to this article every few years on 9/11 (I think I posted this on Twitter at some point too).

Maybe it’s the 90’s / early 2000’s nostalgia. For a period of time that I can remember: grainy digital pictures taken with a camera rather than a phone, the dawning of Web 2.0, a New York City that is recognizable to me now that I live here but a version of it I never experienced first-hand. There’s something about Windows on the World that evoke the venues of the numerous weddings of cousins I went to around then.

It’s also probably that Konstantin’s story is such a quintessential New York City one: emigrates to the city, has a small network of countrymen there, finds jobs he is over-qualified for, cobbles together a life, can’t get over how lucky he has it.

In re-reading this one this year, I discovered that the web server that hosted these images is miraculously still up. “Album was created 24 years 4 months ago” this one says.

Maybe the gazillion pictures that we are all taking of the world around us isn’t the worst thing after all, provided there’s a place for them to be found after we are gone.