When you make something, you can never know how it will be received by the world, or how the world will change around it, despite it.

Time transforms experience. On September 11, 2001, the day these towers came crashing down in the deadliest terrorist attack in American history, I was ten years old. I saw it happening on TV, and over the next twenty-two years, I grew up with the dissonant second-hand jingoism of American media, and its percolation into the media and culture around me. I felt the distant impacts of America’s War on Terror, and its more immediate reverberations in the escalation of anti-Muslim hate in India.

The words Never Forget rang through the United States and much of the Western world in chest-thumping fashion for much of the first decade after the attacks. But a further decade and more later, memory has branched, mutated and diverged from the official Never Forget, War on Terror, Freedom Fries narratives in unexpected ways.

Now, an image like this would probably make for fantastic meme fodder.

We cannot stop the refraction of memory.

An Irresistible Photograph

Of course, photographs are never as interesting in the moment they are made as they are with time.

This is true of every photograph – a photograph of someone who has since passed away, a photograph of you as a child, or as a young person. A photograph of a meal that was eaten, a photograph of rain, snow, a sunny day, or lightning. And a photograph of a place that no longer exists.

Michael O’Neill captured a rare moment that night in 1998. For three short years, this image would have been special because of the lightning, because of the beauty and rarity of this moment, and because of the luck and skill of the photographer to be so perfectly placed in the right place at the right time.

For those few years, this photograph would have made a marvellous print, to keep, to sell, or to give away. An awe-inspiring image, yes, but not one that inspires fear or terror (I cannot escape the future that is now our past).