Powerful Images from 9/11
You Have Not Seen Before
By Jeremiah Warren
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Marc Garrett, about this image he captured. “The second plane flew directly over my head and slammed into the south tower. It took me a few seconds to get my head together, and this was the shot I took. I’m not a professional photojournalist, but I believe having a camera in my hand and feeling like a I had a “job” to do helped me keep my head.”
The photographer who took this photo mentions that at the time it didn’t occur to him how bad of an idea it was to walk so close to the tower right after it was struck. Later he discovered that he had been hit in the leg by a piece of falling metal, but didn’t notice it until hours later after he had settled down. If you read the comments you’ll find one by the owner of the open delivery truck you see in this image. He mentioned that the driver of the truck, seen in the blue shirt and pants survived the ordeal. The truck, however, was crushed. This image and the following were taken on an Olympus E-10.
This image struck me on a deep emotion level. In the midst of the chaos and destruction there were still people willing to show their selflessness and cover the remains of the victims.
Taken a few moments after the second tower was hit, you can see the cloud of paper floating through the air. Photograph by Ronald Smits.
Photographer Jay Boucher says: “My wife had called me that morning to let me know she was safe. “Huh?” I said. She told me to turn on the TV and there was the Trade Center, burning. I grabbed my cameras and ran out to Hoboken’s Pier A. This is what I saw”.
Photographed by Harvey Silikovitz on Houston Street in Greenwich Village. “An out-of-town TV reporter who is covering the 9/11 tragedy looks at the smoke emanating from the wreckage of the World Trade Center, a couple of miles to the south. Taken during my pre-digital days, this picture happened to be on a roll that for some reason I had gotten burned onto a CD when I got it developed.
A rescue team taking off to attempt a rooftop rescue. They never made it. Photograph by Bryan Thatcher, taken with a Sony Cybershot.
Photographer Michael Foran says “This man was overcome with emotion as we listened to the calls of the Firemen and Police trapped in the rubble of the collapsed towers on his police scanner radio.”
It looks like this woman is shooting with an Olympus film camera. I think I still have the same lens and camera. Photograph by Marc AuMarc.”
There are a lot of photographs of messages scrawled into the dust covering the cars. I can’t make out what the note says. Photograph by Marc AuMarc.
Photographer Hiro says “The firemen were utterly covered by the debris. We all could tell that a lot of it was asbestos, though no one said it outloud. It crossed my mind that this could be the real terror, if all the people around became ill after the fact.”
Photograph by Shayna Marchese. Her father posted this image on his Flickr account, he says “This is 6th Avenue and there was no traffic on it at all. Just pedestrians beginning to realize that the first tower had fallen.”
Photographer Brian Boyd says “I’m running North on West Side Highway, just one block from Chambers street. The tower just collapsed seconds before this photo.”
Photographer Santi-Josea says “I never go down to that area of the city during the week, but there I was on that morning. chance or fate? I was to witness this moment in history. ever since that day seven years ago I almost never leave the house without my camera.”
In 2001, digital cameras were a rare commodity. They were expensive, bulky and captured images that were inferior to the organic look of film. After you downloaded and edited those whopping 3.1 megapixel images, you had very few options of where you could publish them online. Remember when Shutterfly and Snapfish were a thing?
Contrast that to today where you have people shooting magazine covers on cell phones and uploading over 500,000 images to Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter and Facebook every minute. We don’t hear about national tragedies on the news anymore, we read about them in our Twitter and Facebook feeds, seconds after they happen.
When the events of 9/11 took place, the press and professional photographers took thousands of photographs. Television channels, newspapers and magazines showcased these images across the country.
A few photographs were shot by everyday people. I have curated a selection of photographs that most people have not seen. Thanks to the internet these individuals have been able to publish their photos to Flickr but they have few views. When I searched for these images, I was witnessing history again from angles I had not seen before. Therefore, I am sharing these photographs with you.
For the images that were captured on a digital camera, I’ve made a note of the model of the camera. All images are hosted on the account of the person that owns the photographs, none of them were taken down and re-hosted.