For 10 brief days beginning Sept. 7, a West Chelsea gallery dedicated to the display of photography by Brazilian photographers will offer to the public a series of 22 photographs of New York’s Twin Towers.

The color and black-and-white images range in format from classic Polaroids to large C-prints to a diptych.  Some date back to 1973, when the Yamasaki-designed structures were brand new.  Another depicts the more recent single beam of light illuminating the night sky over Manhattan, a ghostly illumination on the site where the towers once stood.

PIIOTO_WTC at 1500 Gallery in West Chelsea will run concurrently with a matching show in Sao Paolo, Brazil.  Both were intitated and curated by Sao Paolo-based journalist Fernando Costa Netto, as a cultural exchange between the two cities.

“These are some of the biggest names in photography in Brazil,” said Andrew Klug, co-founder of 1500 Gallery.  “And this show speaks to our raison d’être of exposing Brazilian photographers to the rest of the world.”

Their photographs are a tribute to the monumental buildings that once anchored lower Manhattan, and whose absence leaves a void not just in the city itself, but within those who love it too. 

“Their destruction was so tragic and changed the world in so many ways,” Klug said.  “So many lives were lost and changed.  We’ve had all these wars, and the inconvenience of travel now.  It was all triggered by that one fateful day in September ten years ago.”

It is, he said, time now to stop and reflect on all of that, and to honor the thousands who’ve died in the wake of the towers’ destruction.

Indeed.

For more on 1500 Gallery, go to http://www.1500gallery.com/

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