Leo Rubinfien’s Wounded Cities grew from an experience at once personal and historical. Days before the attacks of September 11, 2001, Rubinfien moved with his family to an apartment beside New York’s World Trade Center. After witnessing the violence, joining the evacuation and returning to a damaged home, he became concerned not only with visible destruction but with the less legible psychological effects carried through everyday urban life.

Beginning in 2002, Rubinfien spent five years photographing cities recently subjected to terrorist attacks. His itinerary included London, Nairobi, Kuta Beach, Moscow, Buenos Aires, Istanbul and Colombo. Rather than concentrating on ruined buildings or the immediate theater of catastrophe, he looked closely at ordinary inhabitants, asking how anxiety, memory and political tension might register in faces, gestures and public space. The resulting group of more than eighty photographs approaches terrorism indirectly, through the unsettled atmosphere that persists after an event has left the headlines.

The photographs are joined by Rubinfien’s memoir of the period after September 11, in which private anguish is set against the era’s political and ideological intensity. Wounded Cities is therefore neither a conventional documentary survey nor an illustrated autobiography. Its page design brings writing and photography into sustained dialogue, allowing personal recollection, observation and portraiture to qualify one another rather than serving as captions or explanation.

Published by Steidl in 2008 as a 290-page hardcover, the book is significant for the way it gives photobook form to a dispersed, international history of trauma. For collectors interested in photography’s response to recent political events, its importance lies in that measured combination of global scope and intimate attention: violence remains largely outside the frame, while its pressure is sought in the ordinary social world that continues afterward.