What Galleries Want
© RIKKI REICH/COUR TES Y OF MONROE GALLER Y
© NINA BERMAN/COUR TES Y OF MONROE GALLERY
on 9/11 when they were posted on The New York Times’s Lens blog. “Of all the 9/11
work we’ve seen, it stood out to me,” Monroe says. Reich shot the sequence of black-
and-white images of the towers burning and pedestrians fleeing lower Manhattan
from the New Jersey shore of the Hudson River. “It had an epic quality,” Monroe
says. “It was quite striking because it looked like nineteenth-century photography.”
Monroe contacted Reich and told her he was eager to represent the work. He took a
portfolio of her images to The AIPAD Photography Show New York in March and will
be exhibiting it in the gallery this fall. “It’s a moment in history. It may not resonate
with people today, but it’ll have power in ten or 20 years.”
A group show at the gallery titled “History’s Big Picture” provided the Monroes
an opportunity to exhibit a half dozen images by Nina Berman, including images
from her book Homeland, about security measures in America after 9/11, and pho-
tos of the wedding of a severely burned U.S. Marine, which won a World Press
Photo award in 2006. “I’ve been totally bowled over by Nina’s work for years and
years,” says Monroe. In “History’s Big Picture,” Berman’s images followed photos
from World War II and Vietnam.
