Updated

Updated · The Guardian · Sep 5

Phil Buehler Unveils 144 9/11 Missing-Poster Photos for 25th Anniversary in Brooklyn

Updated

Updated · The Guardian · Sep 5

Phil Buehler Unveils 144 9/11 Missing-Poster Photos for 25th Anniversary in Brooklyn

Q: Why did the artist refuse to display these tragic 9/11 pleas in a traditional art gallery setting?

He refused a traditional gallery setting because he felt these images were not ordinary art objects but records of raw grief and public mourning. Buehler said he did not want to “put grief on the white walls of a gallery,” suggesting a conventional art space would aestheticize or distance the emotional reality of the missing-person pleas. Instead, he chose a church because it better matched the purpose of the work: remembrance, reflection and prayer. Curator Sarah Celentano described the exhibition as exploring presence, devotion and remembrance, while the church’s pastor, Rick Riccioli, said the installation functions as an act of kinship and prayer. That choice also reflects the nature of the posters themselves. They began as urgent appeals for information and gradually became informal memorials as hope for survivors disappeared. Displaying them in a sacred setting underscores their role as testimonies to loss and shared humanity, rather than treating them primarily as gallery pieces.

2 articles · Updated · The Guardian · Sep 5

144 photographs of 9/11 missing posters are going on public display for the first time this week in Brooklyn, drawn from more than 500 images Phil Buehler shot in the attack’s aftermath.
25 years after storing the prints away because he could not bear to revisit them, Buehler assembled Countenance at Most Holy Trinity – St Mary’s church as the anniversary approached.
24 translucent vellum panels present the images in vertical pairs echoing the twin towers, tracing how posters shifted from urgent pleas for survivors to informal memorials as hopes faded.
Buehler says the posters captured a broad cross-section of those lost — bankers, service workers, firefighters and transit staff — using wedding, graduation and family photos pulled from pre-smartphone home albums.
The exhibition runs Sept. 5-13 and its curators say the church setting is meant to frame the work as remembrance and empathy for a generation increasingly removed from living memory of 9/11.