First the horror, then the grief and anger. Then the need to see New York, like an old friend back from the brink, and make sure that she's gonna be all right. So that we can be all right.
Paradoxically, travel has never been more or less appealing. For those who remain homebound, the flight of the mind will soon find a landing in Chicago when a piece of New York sets down for a stay. For others, pictures can't replace the real. They need to be there, and see it, or to be near there, and choose not to.
In the meantime, we're processing the past few months. Wounds are becoming history; the crime scene is becoming a tourist memorial. The tackiness is back.
We're healing.

The young woman is tiny. She would not stand out among the surge of figures in the close space were it not for her orange pants, a blast of fire matching the combustible images covering every inch above eye level the eye can take in. December in SoHo: two storefronts, a former agnes b. for women store, are no longer neat with fashion, but swollen with sorrow and torrents of imagery, hanging from walls and wires, with clusters of New Yorkers comparing their own memories (or evidence) of those moments on September 11 and afterward. My eye skitters over the visual documentation of that day but sudden as photos, I see the woman recoil and my eye is drawn to what she has seen. Tucked into the other frozen instants, the image seems at first gulls from the Hudson against the burning towers, but they're death swans, frozen dives, figures alive, soon gone from the frame. Her head snaps toward mine: two strangers, we're both crying. We're both tiny in the face of the horrifying proof and of this moment.

Presented by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, "here is new york: a democracy of photographs," images by professional and amateur photographers, makes its first major appearance—outside those two crowded rooms—in Chicago. The show of more than 1,500 images opens Friday at 72 East Randolph, a 2,500-square-foot storefront across from the Chicago Cultural Center. Will the emotional wallop be different? While Chicago viewers will not be seeking corroboration of having been geographically in that moment, emotions can't help but well. This was a shared apocalypse.

The Chicago space is airier than New York's provisional setting, well able to handle their 3,000 visitors-a-day level of traffic. There is one added oddity: Many of the photos in Chicago are suspended above eye level. While not totally crick-inducing, it bears the symbolic weight of the posture taken by so many New Yorkers visiting Ground Zero: looking upward at absence, as if the human gaze could sketch the fallen figures back into place.

Looking over the photos without a crowd on Monday as art installers were two-thirds through their task, fully into their gallows humor, I was struck by how the iconography is commonplace three months on, but also capable of fresh shock. The eye races, the brain denies, then suddenly a concrete image shocks, alarms, terrifies, dismays. There's one image of the towers in flame in the distance, as if taken on a Brooklyn rooftop, conical black smoke cycloning into the sky. As if the photo of someone's girlfriend, a young woman looks toward the camera, squinting from the sun, smiling at her beholder. It's like a souvenir of a day at the beach: remember that honey?

The panoply of photos is not wholly at random; verticals are mingled with horizontals, similarly themed images are spread apart. There is a certain subversive power to the truly great photos being shuffled amid the great ones, as surprising as the swelling white flocks of memos fluttering down on Brooklyn and Queens that day. Patrol cars, enflamed. Flattened fire pumpers. A sign: "KEEP YOUR MASK ON AT ALL TIMES." In business garb, ash-dusted faces retreat. In firefighting apparel, sweat-sleek faces advance. "Good Morning America" on a Times Square Jumbotron, sending images across the nation. And this horror: on Church Street below the site, a stunning shot, as much Brueghel as Philip-Lorca diCorsia, as a dozen or so figures run from the clouds of onrushing debris, faces in postures of frozen panic, each purchase of adrenaline creating a different organic reaction. But always human.

Witness is not always art. But photography offers us the gift of the offhand, the seen but not understood. Look over the photos. We know what happened, but we still do not know what has been done.

Selected digital prints will be on sale, as well at Etienne Sauret's "the first 24 hours," a heartbreakingly direct documentary about the immediate aftermath at Ground Zero. A twelve-minute version of the documentary will be shown continuously at 72 East Randolph.