Traces of the Virtual: Aesthetics, Affect, and the Event in Joel Meyerowitz’s Photography of Ground Zero

This article approaches Joel Meyerowitz’s Ground Zero photography in Aftermath through a theorization of aesthetics and the event. I attempt to move beyond the common scholarly claim that Meyerowitz’s images of ruins and destruction have simply functioned as government propaganda for the War on Terror. I draw from Jill Bennett’s recent work on aesthetics and Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense in order to conceptualize photography as an affective and aesthetic encounter with the event in its becoming. I contend that Meyerowitz’s more recent publication of his photography in Aftermath enables affective encounters through sublime and uncanny aesthetics. Approaching aesthetics as an affective encounter, a kind of sense event that is distinctive through its abstraction of the historical event, I argue that an examination of the affective dimensions of ruins might map the potential for viewers of Meyerowitz’s photographs to be caught between multiple and contradictory histories and geographies, memorie...