The twentieth century turned anxiously into the twenty-first—Y2K doomsday. Computers, it was feared, would all implode, and before 2000, feverish nations spent millions to avoid this catastrophe, which didn’t happen, but a year into the century, it did—9/11. The Towers came down, so-called ordinary Americans randomly attacked Muslims, and George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld launched a preemptive, disastrous war against Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11.
While 9/11’s detritus blew in the wind, polluting lungs, the photography editor Alice Rose George and others curated a pop-up gallery in SoHo to display 9/11 pictures. Amateur and professional disaster photographs covered the walls. Easily taken, easily deleted, cell phone pictures were instant, and instantly blurred categories. In them, the decade found its avatar.
In 1991, cell phone technology evolved from analog to digital. Photoshop, released a year earlier, would prove subversive, by inciting ex post facto image remakes. Many artists embraced the software’s
