Selfies from the 9/11 Memorial

According to Linfield, photography can be a defense mechanism when people visit monuments to atrocity. “Perhaps people are shielding themselves from contemplating the horror of the event by photographing it—and photographing themselves at it,” she wrote to me. “This seems like a way to diminish experience, to diminish history, to diminish doubt and uncertainty and contradiction and thought—and hide behind the camera instead.'”