Boston Reunion
April 10, 2014 10:07 AM   Subscribe

Photographs of survivors and responders from the Boston Marathon bombing as they convene on Boston a year later. Powerful stuff.
posted by mathowie (14 comments total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
Except that it has That Formatting.

Going to be a huge day a week from Monday.
posted by Melismata at 10:13 AM on April 10, 2014 [2 favorites]


Thank you for posting these. I'm not fast enough for Boston yet (and I'm only going to run Boston by qualifying), but I will be in Central Park with my "Run for Boston" shirt on Tuesday morning, remembering that the vast majority of people injured and killed on April 15, 2013 were spectators.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:14 AM on April 10, 2014


The Daffodils are starting to bloom.

I can't wait to watch the race this year.
posted by bondcliff at 10:38 AM on April 10, 2014 [4 favorites]


What a beautiful commemorative project.
posted by iamkimiam at 11:04 AM on April 10, 2014


I can't imagine how painful it must have been for some of the people to return to that spot. I wonder how the photographer convinced people to show up for photos? I am guessing he stressed how empowering it could be and that the photos would be this great in the end?
posted by mathowie at 11:23 AM on April 10, 2014 [1 favorite]




trying not to cry at work. . .
posted by garlic at 12:29 PM on April 10, 2014


Photographs... convene?
posted by Pruitt-Igoe at 12:31 PM on April 10, 2014


Other opportunities to get emotional: Our Marathon - a crowd-sourced digital archive on the Boston bombing hosted by Northeastern. It also includes an "exhibit" featuring Marathon items from the Boston City Archive "opening" on the 15th, and the WBUR Oral History Project.

WBUR is also producing a solid series of stories on this year's marathon [disclaimer - I'm part of one of them].
posted by dchase at 1:33 PM on April 10, 2014


I look forward to the photos of the redditors who were on the case in realtime.
posted by symbioid at 2:03 PM on April 10, 2014 [2 favorites]


Tangentially related: Adrianne Haslet-Davis, who lost a leg in the bombing, uses a robotic prosthetic to dance again in this TED talk. Pretty powerful stuff.

Her story begins at 14:52, but I encourage you to watch the whole video, it's mind blowing (to me at least).
posted by kyp at 4:11 PM on April 10, 2014 [1 favorite]


Mr Fig and Mother-in-Law Fig were there, 200 ft away when the bombs went off. They were completely unharmed, thank God. I was back home in Chicago flipping the fuck out. Nothing was as sweet as getting breakfast the day after he came home and everything being normal (drinking coffee, having shared smartphone web browsing time), compared to what could have been, had he and his mom been on the other side of the street.

Mr Fig is running it again this year, his mom's doing the 5K on Saturday, and I am going to be a crying mess of a spectator.

These are great, thanks for sharing.
posted by Fig at 6:09 PM on April 10, 2014


I think I went into this expecting it to be sappy, but I came out really liking how each person got to choose their own "message". Each message could potentially be taken as kind of trite on its own, but in aggregate, I felt like there was a really interesting sense of the diversity of perspectives people took away from this event. Like the guy whose message was "moving on"-- that's not really a perspective we see that often in the media, and not so much part of our narrative around Tragic Events.

When "Boston Strong" first came out as a slogan in the aftermath, I felt it was a sentiment that was overwhelmingly cheesy and marketingy though understandable as something for a traumatized city to cling on to. I've come to really appreciate the phrase, though, for what it offers rhetorically and also what it shows about our region's character. It's inclusive, optimistic, and can exist as a powerful sentiment independent of the attack that generated it.
posted by threeants at 7:22 PM on April 10, 2014


Crossing Mass Ave over the Pike there's a sticker that says "Remember 4/20" and every time I pass it I just think "Nah". My favorite response, and I don't remember who said it, but it's "You think this is going to change us?".

My second favorite is a riff on the standard Massachusetts town line sign; the modified version says "Entering Boston - This is our fucking city".
posted by benito.strauss at 7:41 PM on April 10, 2014


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