1 September - 31 October 2026
The World Trade Center: Before Memory
A Photography Exhibition Taking Viewers Back to a New York Where the Twin Towers Were Still Part of Everyday Life
By Gretchen So
About the project:
History has the power to transform photographs without changing a single frame.
Gretchen So’s black-and-white photographs from the early 1990s bring us back to a New York in which the Twin Towers were still part of the everyday landscape. Seen from streets, bridges, waterfronts and public spaces across the city and beyond Manhattan, the towers appear and reappear in the distance. Sometimes they command attention; elsewhere they recede into the surrounding architecture or occupy only a small corner of the frame.
So began photographing the towers during a difficult period in her life. Their recurring presence across New York gave her a sense of continuity and connection. She was not seeking to memorialize them, but to observe the city around her and trace her relationship to its architecture and space. The towers entered the photographs as part of that environment, familiar and seemingly permanent.
The exhibition is organized into four thematic groups. Common Presence situates the towers within the rhythms of daily life, among pedestrians, traffic and ordinary street scenes. Persistent Horizon follows their distant forms across the city, where they serve as recurring points of orientation. Deferred Access presents views shaped by fences, roads, bridges and other obstructions, suggesting an approach toward the towers without ever arriving. Latent Memory brings together photographs whose incidental details acquire an unsettling resonance today, revealing how later events can alter our understanding of an earlier image.
So was studying Arts Administration at Columbia University when the September 11 attacks took place. Returning to this body of work twenty-five years later, she presents a New York that could not yet imagine the towers’ absence. What once offered the artist personal reassurance now serves as a record of that earlier city. The images themselves have not changed, but history has transformed how we see them.