The Lewis Baltz Library - Steidl

Leo Rubinfien
Wounded Cities
One week before September 11, 2001, Leo Rubinfien, his wife and small children moved into a new apartment next door
to the World Trade Center in New York. They witnessed the violence of that day close up, fled with the crowds of evacuees,
and later returned to a damaged home and a city whose wounds remained open for years. The physical destruction
in Manhattan was obvious to everyone, but Rubinfien believed that the hidden, “mental wound” was the more
profound one, and in 2002 he began to photograph in cities around the world that had suffered severely, in
recent times, from terror attacks. Over five years he would visit locations that included London, Nairobi, Kuta Beach,
Moscow, Buenos Aires, Istanbul and Colombo, looking intimately at the ordinary people of those cities, and
searching their faces to see how the anxious air of the terror era touched and shaped the spirit.
Wounded Cities combines eighty-four intensely evocative photographs from this project with a memoir in which
Rubinfien poignantly explores the anguish and the political passions of the period that began with September 11. Its
unusual page design weaves word and image into one of the most original hybrid books photography has produced,
and one of the fundamental works of art to emerge from the attacks of 2001.
Leo Rubinfien’s first book of photographs, A Map of the East, appeared as a one-man exhibition at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art and has been called “one of the legendary works on Asia” (Donald Richie). His work is in the
permanent collections of major museums in America, Europe and Japan and has been exhibited around the world, while
his essays on photographers of the 20th century are among the essential writings on photography. He was recently
Guest Curator of Shomei Tomatsu’s 2004-2007 retrospective, and co-author of the accompanying book,
Skin of the Nation.
Exhibitions from Wounded Cities will appear at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. October 18, 2008 to
February 16, 2009 and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, January to April 2009
Co-published with The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Leo Rubinfien
Wounded Cities
Photographs and text by Leo Rubinfien
Book design by Leo Rubinfien and Min Jung Kwak
300 pages with 84 color and b/w plates
10.75 x 6.75 in./26.8 x 16.8 cm
Includes 50 gatefold spreads (9.75 x 6.25 in./24.75 x 15.8 cm)
Hardcover with dust jacket
US$55.00/£30.00/€40.00
ISBN 978-3-86521-676-2
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