On the morning of September 11, 2001, Phil Buehler stood at his office window and watched the Twin Towers fall. He had been photographing the World Trade Center since 1973, when he was sixteen years old and the buildings were still new to the Manhattan skyline — so the sight carried a particular, personal weight, the kind that settles into the body rather than simply the mind. By evening, he had spotted the first of what would become an overwhelming tide of hand-made posters: a single sheet taped to a bar window in Tribeca, the word "Missing" printed in hasty letters above a face that would, almost certainly, never come home. Over the weeks that followed, Buehler cycled through a city made strange by silence, photographing those posters wherever they appeared — on subway grates, on chain-link fences, on the glass fronts of neighbourhood stores.

Shrines bloomed in Union Square and Washington Square Park with the urgent, improvised beauty of things made in grief. He amassed more than 500 images before placing them in a box on a high shelf, where they remained, unseen, for nearly a quarter of a century. "You knew that there would be very few survivors," he recalls. "You knew it then.

" Now, as the twenty-fifth anniversary arrives, Buehler has finally returned to that box. The resulting installation, *Countenance: The 9/11 Missing Posters*, opens this week at Most Holy Trinity – St Mary's church in Brooklyn, where 144 photographs are printed on 24 translucent vellum panels, arranged in vertical pairs that quietly echo the shape of the towers themselves. Each poster in the exhibition was, in its moment, a radical act of hope — a plea directed at the indifferent city — and each one, displayed now in candlelit stillness, asks the visitor to consider what it means to search for someone who is already, in every likelihood, gone. Buehler himself had been invited to a breakfast meeting at the Windows on the World restaurant at the top of the north tower that morning, but had declined; a friend who intended to go was delayed and survived.