October 10, 2001 creates a personal version of the original FBI Most Wanted Terrorist list to question the construction of a monolithic Islamic Fundamentalist enemy. First released to the public on October 10, 2001, the list named 22 men already indicted for hijackings or bombings committed before September 11, 2001. Modeled on the Most Wanted Fugitive list first created in the 1950s, the list was a milestone in creating an image of the enemy for the post 9-11 world. In October 10, 2001, I interpret the list using what I know, my own family. The name of the series pays tribute to Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 which drew attention to the impossibility of a clear and accurate view of the Red Army Faction, a terrorist group active in Germany in the 1970s.
Each of the 264 images that make up the of 22 prints, October 10, 2001 was created by dividing up one of twelve photographs of my family members into 75-pixel squares. Those squares were then rearranged into an image of one of the men from the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorist list. The rearrangement is done with a JavaScript application written by Desalyne Biru, which I commissioned for this project. This script runs in Photoshop. It matches the tonal values of the squares of the source and destination images by comparing their histograms. With simple cutting and pasting, it translates square-by-square one image into another.
Upon close inspection, little bits of my family — the corner of a mouth, the texture of a scarf, strands of hair — are discernible. Stand back and we become invisible. The terrorists emerge, some clearly, some a chaotic clump of incoherent squares. Outlines of each man cohere amid the overall texture and patterning of the constituent squares. On the one side of this equation, there is my family about whom I know many intimate details while their public personas remain invisible to me. On the other side, there are 22 men indicted for terrorist acts of whom I know only through the great distance of news media.
The mug shots that accompany the Most Wanted Terrorist list construct a unified picture of the unknown enemy, Blurry and indistinct, they can only be distinguished by whether or not they wear western dress. With the perspective of 6 years, the list did contain Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a key planner of the 9-11 attacks. It also contained Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a man who played a minor role in the 1998 attacks on the American embassies in East Africa. Both men are now in Guantanamo Bay. If you read their own words from their Combatant Status Review Tribunals, one man is a proud warrior against the United States, the other uninformed and apologetic. October 10, 2001 questions the monolithic representation of the terrorist enemy as well as our ability to understand those outside our own experience.