In the summer of 2001, Konstantin Petrov took hundreds of digital photographs of everyday scenes and objects at the World Trade Center—scenes which, though destroyed in one of history’s most photographed events, had hardly been photographed at all.
Nelson felt as though he had stumbled on the tomb of King Tut. For whatever reason, this Petrov had turned an archivist’s eye on the banalities of an office building and a sky-top restaurant, which, though destroyed in one of history’s most photographed events, had hardly been photographed at all. The pictures were beautiful, too. Devoid of people, and suffused with premonitory gloom, they made art out of a site that most New Yorkers, at the time, had come to think of as an eyesore.
Nelson and his crew tried to track him down, but the trail was cold. His file on Fotki had pictures dating back to 1990. Kids with boom boxes and giant cell phones on the outskirts of Tallinn. Birthday snapshots, of Petrov and his friends brandishing bottles of vodka and ketchup. Even some photographs of Ground Zero and the area around it after the collapse. But after June, 2002, there were no more photos.
Eventually, Nelson reached the founder of Fotki, an Estonian named Dmitri Don. Don, a computer programmer, had come to New York in 1995 and had developed Fotki with his wife so that he and his friends could share photographs with people back in Estonia. This was well before Flickr and Facebook. “We were the first,” Don said last week, via Skype.
In 1998, Don had persuaded Petrov, a friend and childhood neighbor, to move to New York. Don was twenty-two, Petrov twenty-five. Petrov, who in Estonia had made and sold boxes to hack TV signals from Finland, took out a classified ad offering his services as an electrician. For a while, he worked without a license. Eventually, he got a student visa, and then a green card, via marriage.
Nelson, in looking through Petrov’s pictures , had noticed a lot of motorcycle photos. He developed a theory that Petrov had been killed in a motorcycle crash. He asked Don about this. Don recalled that the first day Petrov had a motorcycle in New York he got six tickets, the first for speeding past a police car. Don once rode on the back of Petrov’s bike, in Brooklyn, at a hundred and twenty miles an hour. “I was scared so much!” Don recalled. Anyway, Nelson was right.
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