MONTICELLO – As we confront the anniversary of one of our nation’s greatest tragedies, the following phrase may appear on television, social media, or in conversation: “Never Forget.”

Sullivan County photojournalist and scholar Jonathan C. Hyman, whose work centers on public speech, vernacular art, and contemporary American popular culture, has created a project that gives context to statements like the one above.

To explore the meaning behind such cultural artefacts, Hyman traveled around the country photographing responses to the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. From this vantage point, his work documents a robust tapestry of murals, tattoos, and other visual mediums that reference the 9/11 tragedy. Hyman’s photographs are a cornerstone collection of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum.

Despite popular assertions that Americans’ response was wholly nationalistic, Hyman’s photographs show a variety of artistic expressions that encapsulate every human emotion, ranging from anger to messages of hope and unity.

Hyman’s presentation to the Sullivan County Legislature on September 10 focused on the use of visual language in iconography to make connections about how people use imagery. He posed the question: “How do people start drawing from their popular culture?”

Hyman said the response to 9/11 was a “social and psychological rupture, something so outside the box, so traumatic, that there was this collective vulnerability that we felt as a culture.”

Hyman then showed a photograph of a countertop at a minimart in Smallwood that displayed a picture of Osama bin Laden with a caption that reads, “Wanted Dead or Alive.”

“These things are woven into the fabric of our lives, and it’s one of the ways you’d never forget,” he said. “This was a lived experience, the hair on my arm is standing up just talking about it. It was really an incredible time.”

Hyman gave an example of angry language used as text and printed on flags: Never forgive, never forget. One of his photographs of a run-down house in Delhi, NY, had the following phrase spraypainted across its side in large red letters: God forgives but we don’t.

Despite such examples of strong language, Hyman said there were also calls for peace. He showed a photograph of a playground mural featuring Sesame Street’s Big Bird in which the World Trade Center Towers are painted pink. Hyman said this referenced childhood and naivety. Another photograph showed a mural depicting the Twin Towers as flowers, which Hyman said referenced the Flower Power movement of the late 1960s that protested the atrocities of the Vietnam War.

Hyman’s presentation to the legislature was a poignant glimpse into the soul of America at a time when the nation was grappling with a shocking new vulnerability in its collective psyche.

The terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 elicited nationalistic sentiment and anger, but, as Hyman’s elaborate work documents, it also provoked calls for peace, hope and unity.