As the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks approaches, photographer Phil Buehler is publicly displaying, for the first time, a selection of images he took of the improvised "missing" posters that appeared across New York City in the days after the attacks. Buehler photographed more than 500 such posters at the time but found them too painful to look at, storing the collection away in a box for years before deciding to revisit it as the anniversary neared. The exhibition offers a poignant record of one of the most searing visual features of the tragedy's aftermath.

The installation, titled Countenance: The 9/11 Missing Posters, is being staged at Most Holy Trinity–St Mary's church in Brooklyn and presents 144 images across 24 translucent vellum panels arranged in vertical pairs echoing the twin towers. Buehler, who had photographed the World Trade Center since 1973, watched the towers collapse from his office window and spent the following weeks cycling through the city documenting the spontaneous shrines and posters that appeared on fences, subway entrances and storefronts. The posters, made by desperate families before the era of smartphones and cloud photo storage, ranged from professionally formatted flyers to hurried handwritten notes taped to paper, often repurposing wedding, graduation or family photographs to help identify the missing.