John Bulmer 9/8/26 John Bulmer 9/8/26

Witness Marks 25

Witness Marks 25 is John Bulmer’s 25-image photography project documenting World Trade Center steel in Saratoga Springs, New York, 25 years after 9/11.

“I didn't set out to make ruin beautiful. I set out to prove that what's beautiful in it was never the ruin, it was what refused to disappear.”
-John Bulmer, September 2026

This year marks 25 years since 9/11, a quarter century.

One in ten Americans today have no memory of it at all. They know it the way they know any other date in a history book. (Pew Research)

That's part of why I made this project.

Witness Marks 25 is 25 photographs, one for each year since. I spent eight months returning to the same piece of steel: World Trade Center wreckage built into Tempered by Memory, a 2012 sculpture by John Van Alstine and Noah Savett at High Rock Park in Saratoga Springs.

I photographed the sculpture in every season, in fog, in snow, in early morning light and late summer heat. The sequence starts close, on rust and welds and bent metal, then pulls back until the whole piece comes into view.

Twenty-five images. Twenty-five years. A way of looking at how memory holds up, or doesn't, over that much time.

The steel changed. The world changed. And so did we.