‘Please find daddy’: the haunting missing posters of September 11 — SkimNews
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- Phil Buehler photographed more than 500 missing-person posters on September 11 and the days that followed, cycling through eerily empty New York streets on 20 rolls of film before sealing the prints in a box on a high shelf for 25 years because he could not face them.
- "Countenance: The 9/11 Missing Posters" opens this week at Most Holy Trinity – St Mary's church in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, displaying 144 images across 24 translucent vellum panels arranged in vertical pairs meant to evoke the twin towers.
- The posters morphed from missing-person alerts into informal memorials as rescue workers confirmed there were no survivors, shifting from physical identifiers — a butterfly tattoo, surgical scars, the colour of a tie — to tributes like "has three kids, I miss him" and "captain of the whatever."
- Buehler's archive captures a democratic cross-section of the towers' workforce, with Wall Street investment bankers appearing alongside off-duty firefighters, paramedics, transit workers, and Latino service staff from Windows on the World.
- The show is co-curated by Sarah Celentano and Olena Speranska, who was forced to flee her home in Ukraine after Russia's 2022 full-scale invasion.
- The church is a French Gothic Revival Franciscan parish, an order that lost Father Mychal Judge — the beloved FDNY chaplain and first certified fatality of the attacks — giving the installation a direct 9/11 spiritual lineage.
- Buehler's other memorial works include Empty Beds, honouring Ukrainian children abducted since Russia's 2022 invasion, and Wall of Tears, memorialising children killed in Gaza since October 2023.
Why it matters: Celentano explicitly frames the installation as "an antidote to the political cynicism of the present day," and Buehler himself speaks with melancholy about a post-9/11 national unity that he believes has vanished — making this 144-photograph display a deliberate civic artifact for an audience that has no living memory of the attacks. Housing the archive in a Franciscan church with Father Mychal Judge's lineage reframes the posters from photojournalism into devotional objects.
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