Reflecting on 9-11: On display in the Brooklyn Museum's "Looking Back From Ground Zero" exhibit is G.N. Miller's "Guarding the Tomb," taken on Sept. 11, 2001.

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As galleries across New York struggle to mark the five-year anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Brooklyn Museum is approaching the task from a unique perspective. "Looking Back From Ground Zero: Images From The Brooklyn Museum Collection," which is an exhibition of paintings, photographs, prints and drawings from the Museum’s permanent collection, reflects on the Lower Manhattan area around the World Trade Center site before, as well as after, the attack. The result is somewhere in between nostalgia and horror, tapping into that hidden feeling in all of us that still - half a decade later - can’t believe the Twin Towers are gone.

That sense of disbelief pervades the exhibition from its opening display, Gerard Maynard’s photograph of Ground Zero snapped on Sept. 11, 2003 that is so gargantuan that one must step back to comprehend the eerie smoothness of the dirt marking the gaping hole. Many of the works that follow require such physical distancing; not because of their size, but because grappling with the quiet emotion inherent in these depictions of the lost towers necessitates a few deep breaths, and perhaps the squeeze of a loved one’s hand.

There was a lot of hand-squeezing in the gallery on a recent rainy Saturday when GO Brooklyn visited the exhibit. There was also a lot of explaining to do, as children inquired about the differences in the photographs in the first section of the exhibit - an historical snapshot of life in Lower Manhattan, known as "Radio Row," before and during the construction of the Towers - and the second, depicting the aftermath of the attack.

A short film, "Building the World Trade Center," answers some of those questions, although it is difficult to regard the construction workers, hoisting massive steel beams, without recalling the images of people falling that have been so indelibly burned into our collective memory. (It’s also nauseating to see the aerial views of the towers, creating a horrifying sense of the decision many inside the buildings faced on that day.) We learn from the film that those beams, or "trees," provided the buildings with their strength, and gain a renewed appreciation for the painstaking effort that went into the creation of these monumental structures but also a heightened incredulity that it took mere minutes to flatten them.

The exhibit reminds us of a community that existed before the towers were erected. One hundred and sixty small buildings were demolished to make way for the World Trade Center, which opened in 1972.

Before there was anything to compare it to, many truly mourned the metamorphosis of that old way of life in Lower Manhattan, co-curator Marilyn Kushner told GO Brooklyn.

"We discovered that there was a lot that was lost when that area was demolished to make way for the World Trade Center buildings," Kushner said. "What happened on 9-11 was an unspeakable tragedy, and nothing can equal the great loss sustained by those who lost their family and friends on that day. But interestingly, the earlier loss of buildings created a big controversy in and of itself."

The exhibit also tackles the misconceptions many of us harbored before 9-11 changed our lives forever. As it turned out, the towers were not indestructible; although Minoru Yamasaki, the architect of the buildings, notes that the driving force behind the construction of the towers was not to boast of America’s economic omnipotence, but to symbolize world peace: "The World Trade Center is a living symbol of man’s dedication to world peace, a representation of man’s belief in humanity."

Given those ambitions, it’s even more heart-wrenching to grapple with the portion of the exhibit detailing the towers’ destruction, for if the World Trade Center symbolized world peace, what does it mean for us now that they are gone? The exhibit can’t answer that question and doesn’t attempt to. Instead, we are left to face the raw images captured by G.N. Miller, one of the first photographers allowed access to the area in the hours following the attack. The jarring scenes - a pair of shoes abandoned in the dust near the Wall Street subway station, a fireman praying beside the empty jacket and hat of a fallen comrade - are stark reminders of the collective terror of those first few hours.

There are more startling displays, too, that reach beyond the photographic medium. Christopher Drager’s 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle depicts the mulch of Ground Zero in 2003, while Jennifer Pun’s alphabetical listing of the people who died in the attack is superimposed on an image of Lower Manhattan. A graphic documentation of actual phone conversations and messages on 9-11 by Jessica Green is shielded in a glass cube, making it hard to read, but also, perhaps, protecting us from the pain of getting too close to those memories.

And J. Meejin Yoon’s interactive display, "Absence," allows museum-goers to finger the pages of a tiny, all-white 120-page book, each page - one for every floor of the towers - blank except for a pinhole and two cutout squares. (GO Brooklyn overheard one father explain it to his child this way: "’Absence’ means a negative space. It means there is now air where the buildings were.")

But one of the most poignant elements of the exhibition comes in the form of our own voices: in the final section, museum-goers are invited to share their written thoughts in a book. The result is telling. Thumbing through the inscriptions, one witnesses an array of emotions, echoing sentiments ranging from "Bush let them come down" to "God Bless America" to "Everyone’s insides are screaming as they see these pictures" to "I’m still pissed off at them. Maybe someday I’ll heal." These words are the closest thing we have to comprehension; identifying with the uninhibited grief, anger and sadness of others in our community is one way for us to begin to try and make sense of it all.

While the exhibition attempts to close on a redemptive note - Sara Parkel’s string of Tibetan prayer flags - many may leave with images of terror more prevalent in their minds. That’s because the exhibition space itself, with its blue-and-gray painted walls and imitation steel "trees," hauntingly evokes a sense of actually being inside the absent buildings.

Nor does the exhibition feel like resolution, which - for many of us - remains elusive, even five years later. Or as one toddler leaving the exhibition put it to his father, "But Daddy, why did the towers fall down?" It’s a question that many of us are still struggling to answer.

"Looking Back From Ground Zero: Images From The Brooklyn Museum Collection" is on display through Jan. 7, 2007 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Pkwy. at Washington Avenue in Prospect Heights. Suggested contribution: $8; $4, students with valid ID; $4, adults 65 and older; free, members and children younger than 12. For more information, call (718) 638-5000 or visit the Web site www.brooklynmuseum.org.

©2006 Community Newspaper Group