“Standups”

By Dr. Ulrike Meyer Stump

(Translated from German)

Frank Schramm’s series “Standups” portrays the live TV appearances of reporters in New York during the eight weeks following September 11, 2001.

While the famous book published by Scalo in 2002, Here Is New York. A Democracy of Photographs, derives its expressive power from anonymous eyewitness reports and, in its profusion, becomes a vehicle for collective grief therapy, the theoretical discussion about the terror attack and its meaning for a new world order over the past nine years has mainly focused on the global “mediatization” of the event.(e.g. Jean Baudrillard, Slavoj Zizek, etc.).

The “Standups” series anticipated this discussion. It is not an anecdotal reportage about the work behind the scene of the news producers, but a series of portraits which show the TV announcers shortly before or during the moment of their big appearance. While the TV consumer remembers the iconic images of the crashing twin towers, the expression and posture of the reporters, the “standups”, sinks in subconsciously. TV networks choose not simply to show the images of the World Trade Center site, with voice-over by the reporters, because the reporters themselves authenticate the historic event with their presence on location. Even if they are not stationed directly at the site of the event, they give the event a face.

Schramm’s portraits are full of contradictions: reporters who struggle to find the right words, with shock written all over their face, still make us think that they are using this opportunity to advance their professional careers and grab their share of the global limelight. The efforts on the part of the TV crews to stage the shots contrast with the banality of the West Side Highway in the background and, especially, with the absence of the actual site of the attack. The make-up and artificial light contrast with the notebooks and sneakers which will not be visible on TV; the reporters’ high-tech wiring stands out against the backdrop of the hand-crafted open air stages that appear almost comical.

The main visible actors of 9-11–apart from victims and rescuers–are not the terrorists but the media reporters who are writing world history based on a highly symbolic, yet still local event. Frank Schramm shows them in full-length portraits the way only kings–in the hierarchy of the academic portrait tradition–could be depicted as the main actors of political history. In large-format prints, he gives the news announcers and their entourage a truly monumental presence on the wall of the museum.

With his “Standups”, Frank Schramm may present a series about the work of journalists, but it is not a journalistic series. Rather, it is an artistic reflection on the role of the media–and their individual actors–in the construction of meaning. The images are a testament to the uniqueness of this specific historical event which, in its fulfillment in the collapse of the towers, found its own iconic image and immediately lost it again. In Frank Schramm’s powerful work, each portrait testifies to the complexity of the media representation of 9/11; but it is in the series that the intelligence and precision of the artist’s approach manifests itself.

Dr. Ulrike Meyer Stump is a Lecturer in the History of Photography at the Zurich University of the Arts and at the University of Zurich, Switzerland