Watching the World Change, page 1
Additional Praise for Watching the World Change
“A brief review can’t do justice to Watching the World Change, a lucid, thoughtful, and wide-ranging book. In truth, Friend’s excellent writing conveys more of the truth of the day than photographs can.”
—Garrison Keillor, The New York Times Book Review
“Turns a familiar story around and helps us understand why we saw events as we did.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Friend has done a massive amount of gumshoe work in tracking down the stories behind the images themselves.”
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Compelling…Surely the most original treatment so far of the cultural impact of the day.”
—Frank Rich, The New York Times
“Friend creates a cool, critical space for the consideration of tragedy.”
—The Atlantic
“Intriguing…a fresh look.”
—People
“Carefully mixes the stories behind the images in the book—both famous and obscure—with perceptive commentary on their powers.”
—The Christian Science Monitor
“At times, his eloquent prose reads like poetry that begs to be reread…. Friend’s book forces us to remember what we want to forget.”
—Atlanta Life magazine
“Informed and intimate…Friend ends with the complex story of what became a symbol of Ground Zero: the celebrated image of three firemen raising the American flag—à la Iwo Jima—in the rubble.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Impressively researched…revealing…Friend communicates a profound knowledge and love of photography.”
—British Journalism Review
“David Friend has constructed an elegant and moving examination of the photographic legacy of that day in history…. Beautifully written.”
—The Times-Picayune (New Orleans)
“In painstaking—one could say loving—detail, Friend recounts the individual histories.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine
“Friend covers the visual record of post-9/11 America with the same attention to detail and hard analysis that David Halberstam devoted to political events.”
—The Hartford Courant
“Iridescent commentary…lucidly written, and urgently argued…essential.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Captivating…gripping…Friend makes a strong argument that the images tell the real story.”
—BookPage
“A meticulously written, carefully considered text…Richly deserves the sizable audience that Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center attracted.”
—Richmond Times-Dispatch
“A tour de force.”
—The Oregonian
“Compelling…demonstrates the power and pathos of an unforgettable event.”
—Booklist
“A vivid and thoughtful book…perceptive…invaluable.”
—The Common Review
“The story of 9/11 and its aftermath was one told largely through images; now David Friend gives us the stories behind the images themselves, in harrowing, thoughtful, and often moving detail.”
—Dan Rather
“As I read Watching the World Change, my pulse began to quicken. This is an intricately woven tale of that terrible day, that terrible week that is both gripping and thought provoking. The images, of course, are seared in our consciousness, but after reading this book you will look at them in a whole new way. Much has been written about 9/11, but David Friend shows it to us as no one has before.”
—Anderson Cooper
“It is gripping, profound, far-reaching—in fact, an entirely new way of writing about history.”
—Luc Sante
“A tour d’horizon…Friend is always a profoundly empathetic writer, which is a tribute to his sense of proportion—and to his essential humanity.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Fascinating…If this book is any judge, this brave new world could alter the nature of human empathy, tilting it more to the power of the image.”
—The News & Observer (Raleigh, North Carolina)
“Riveting…wide-ranging, and stimulating.”
—Chicago Tribune
“The crystalline images of September 11 soon became blurred, either by hysteria or exploitation or by a certain reticence that mutated into near denial. At last we have a book that looks steadily through the lens and does not flinch, but which cancels voyeurism by its care and measure and by the multiplicity of its perspectives.”
—Christopher Hitchens
“To read Watching the World Change is an overwhelming experience. Beautifully written and observed, as a tribute to the dead, it embodies the Buddhist wisdom about change, life, and the world more than anything written after the events of that day.
A reader can only bear witness to the tenderness and wisdom at the core of this book, which distinguish it throughout. David Friend’s passionate sympathy engages the reader without relenting. Just about all the observations that might be sought from the events of that day are here: victims, survivors in every sense, responders. Loss, pride, a helix of sorrow and shame along the meridians of the world. Along with its records of grief, Watching the World Change celebrates the courage to go on, which may be the most admirable and irreplaceable of human virtues.”
—Robert Stone
For my mother and father
and for Harry Benson
In memory of those who perished
in the September 11 attacks,
including New Yorkers working in
photography and television that day:
Bill Biggart, Gerard Coppola, Donald J. DiFranco,
Steven Jacobson, Robert Edward Pattison,
Glen Pettit, Isaias Rivera,
and William Steckman
Contents
Preface to the 2011 Edition
Introduction
1 Tuesday, September 11
2 Wednesday, September 12
3 Thursday, September 13
4 Friday, September 14
5 Saturday, September 15
6 Sunday, September 16
7 Monday, September 17
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Preface to the 2011 Edition
A decade later comes clarity, not hyperbole. On September 11, 2001, our world did change, after all. And we now realize that the al-Qaeda attacks set in motion a series of aftershocks in American policy and in the national character.
The assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon changed America’s approach to terrorism, to national defense, to personal security, to immigration, to radical Islam. The attacks altered our country’s mourning rituals and the ways we publicly honor lost loved ones. The attacks lowered the nation’s thresholds for privacy and civil liberty, as laws were enacted (they remain on the books as of this writing) to allow widespread wiretapping, e-mail monitoring, and other forms of authorized surveillance. The attacks brought about a revival of so-called black operations in which the federal government rounded up suspected extremists, then interrogated and tortured them at secret overseas locations.
The attacks also changed the political calculus in both Central Asia and the Middle East, helping to establish new regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq following invasions led by the United States. These incursions, in turn, ended up hobbling the American economy, dividing the nation, and reigniting pan-Arab consciousness, amplifying the call for jihad even as al-Qaeda’s professed beliefs and often indiscriminate bloodletting alienated many would-be sympathizers across the region.
And although many still recognize America as the globe’s lone super power (unrivaled in its material and cultural bounty; its commitment to personal freedom, diversity, and the rule of law; its wellsprings of imagination, enterprise, and resilience), from another perspective the invasions altered the nation’s standing in the world, which from the start was one of the goals of al-Qaeda, an organization committed to the decline of America, the West, and their Middle East allies.
The events of 9/11 also signaled one other significant shift. Back in 2001, few could foresee the way the attacks would coincide with a phase change in how we witness and respond to news events—and therefore how society and culture go on to interpret history. Digital technologies fostered in the 1990s would enable much of the world to witness the same incident at the same time. What was only a glimmer then is how the act of newsgathering would be turned on its head: how the spontaneous documentation of events in still photographs and moving pictures—often by citizens carrying camera-equipped mobile devices, whose footage could then be viewable almost instantaneously across the globe—actually takes precedent, in the public mind, over context and analysis.
The image, in effect, is all too often a news event in its own right. Having lost our trust in myriad media outlets, many of us now tend to be wary of news coverage, only finding certain information credible, persuasive, and worthy of our attention when it is portrayed through compelling visual evidence.
Watching the World Change was written to give testimony about the events of that awful day. It was also intended to make a case for the modern-day power of documentary photographs, video, and film. In an age of “virtual reality,” these media help convey a kernel of objective truth. Pictures are especially significant as a form of evidence during a period when new technologies allow anyone with a cause, free software, and an Internet connection to disseminate any kind of alternative historical narrative. Pictures-as-proof—even in the era of Photoshop—can have invaluable impact at a time when a blogger or an intelligence agency, a news outlet or a terrorist organization can create a compelling, if entirely fabricated, version of events, and, in turn, lend credence to Voltaire’s and Napoleon’s assertion that history is little more than authorized fable—“a set of lies agreed upon.”
This book proposes that three advances of the 1990s—digital photography, 24/7 TV newsgathering, and the Internet—allowed the attacks of 9/11 to have nearly universal impact. By the turn of the millennium, these breakthroughs, in fact, made it inevitable that when some earth-shattering event did occur, more than two billion people—a third of the species—would be able to watch it unfold in something like real time (see here).
Perhaps by examining a more contemporary confrontation, we can begin to understand how much has changed since 2001.
In June 2009, thousands of Iranians took to the streets of Tehran. The trigger for this show of public disobedience was the protesters’ belief that the country’s hardline president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had won reelection through massive vote fraud. The demonstrations, staged day after day, were meant as a rebuke of a despot.
From the start, the opposition coordinated its response by flocking to the Facebook page of its leader, Mir Hussein Moussavi, to read updates about the movement and to exchange details about upcoming rallies. It also sent a fusillade of tweets on Twitter—short 140-character word-bursts that would help inform and mobilize the protesters. (“Ashora platoons now moving from valiasr toward National Tv station moussavi’s supporters are already there…”)
As the unrest went into its second week and anti-government sentiment gained momentum across the country, Neda Agha-Soltan attended a rally in Tehran. A twenty-six-year-old philosophy student and a budding Persian pop musician, she stood along the roadside, watching a skirmish between demonstrators and government militiamen. Then, in an instant, she was prone on the pavement, having taken a single bullet to the chest.
A stunned passerby took out his cell phone and switched on its camera. As evidenced in the forty graphic seconds of video he captured, Neda bled from the nose and mouth as companions huddled over her. Later that day, the anonymous cameraman, wary of government censors, e-mailed his two-megabyte file to a neighbor who e-mailed it to friends and media contacts, attaching a message: Please let the world know. “It was one of those friends, an Iranian expatriate in the Netherlands,” according to The New York Times’s Brian Stelter and Brad Stone, “who posted it on Facebook, weeping as he did so.” Within hours of Neda’s death—in an ambulance en route to the hospital—the video clip pulsed up on YouTube, then CNN.
Matthew Weaver, who blogged about the protests for the Web site of the British newspaper The Guardian, outlined these new media dynamics for the Times: “First the tweets come, then the pictures, then the You-Tube videos, then the [news]wires. It’s extraordinary. [An eyewitness account] at one point in the day is then confirmed by more conventional sources four or five hours later.” With so little accurate information emerging from the chaos of those first public gatherings (and with foreign reporters being forced to leave the country as their visas expired), the raw verité of the Neda footage made it at once convincing and alarming. Its happenstance aspect—the reality that a woman going about her business could be killed in the street in a matter of seconds, while a man with a mobile-phone camera, standing only footsteps away, was there to record it—sent shudders through everyone who viewed it. Many saw the random nature of Neda’s death—along with her haunting, open eyes as she lay in the street—as a chilling indictment of Ahmadinejad and the Iranian authorities. Within days, strangers the world over, united in their grief and shock and support, had created dozens of Facebook pages as tributes to a new Iranian martyr. Her murder, asserted Time magazine, was “probably the most widely witnessed death in human history.”
Undeterred, however, the Iranian government gained the upper hand, cracking down on the opposition, arresting scores of protesters, and virtually stifling all dissent in a matter of weeks. In contrast, the popular uprising in Tunisia in early 2011, sparked by several incidents of self-immolation, was largely coordinated via online social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook. (Added momentum came after secret diplomatic cables were leaked through the WikiLeaks Web site, exposing long-suspected government corruption.)
Within four weeks, the unrest would bring about the ouster of Tunisian president Zine el-Abidine Ben-Ali, the first Arab leader to be forced from office in a mass revolt. And in the months to follow, the scenes of defiant crowds, along with unwavering calls for immediate government overthrow, helped prompt similar uprisings throughout the region. This runaway protest movement, most notably in Egypt—where President Hosni Mubarak fled office after eighteen days of demonstrations—was initially spearheaded by young people, all of whom came of age in the digital era, and who were adept at using social media and mobile devices to mobilize. From Tunis to Tripoli, and from Aleppo to the Gulf of Aden, the Arab street had become a chorus of tweets, videos, and Facebook posts. A dispersed population was united not only in its ire but also by the image and the Internet.
Twitter feeds. YouTube clips. Facebook pages. None of these existed on September 11, 2001. Nor did Flickr or WikiLeaks, iPads or Kindles, iPhones or apps. Nor, for that matter, did cell phone cameras. The way we chronicle our world and communicate with one another has changed dramatically. More and more, it seems, it is an Everyman with a smart phone, a blog, or a Twitter account who is the first to file a report when history happens.
It was a tourist with a camcorder who captured the first giant waves of the Asian tsunami of 2004. It was a commuter with a cell phone camera, riding the London Underground, who took the first haunting frames of the transit bombings of 2005. It was young civilians on both sides of the Israeli-Lebanese border who live-blogged during the rocket attacks of 2006, posting pictures and testimonies from their respective basements and bomb shelters. And it was workers in Manhattan office buildings in 2009 who tweeted that a passenger plane had just landed in the Hudson River, right outside their windows.
Meanwhile, the participants themselves have gotten wise to these new realities.1 When Israeli troops, for example, forcibly boarded a pro-Palestinian protest flotilla bound for Gaza in 2010, each side had its cameras rolling as Israeli commandoes stormed one of the ships and were met by activists with knives and metal pipes. (Nine passengers, all Turkish supporters, were killed; severe injuries were sustained by Israelis, Palestinians, and Turks.) By documenting the clash, the combatants realized, they could provide visual proof once something went awry—and shape the retelling of the tale.
Nowadays, history belongs to the first photographer who posts the pictures of it.
The breakneck advances in digital media have their own steep downside. We now have Web sites that provide a surfeit of gossip, marginalia, and streaming videos of demonstrable inconsequence; news channels that offer half-baked opinion around the clock; smart phones and mobile devices that preoccupy us with a false forever-urgency; apps by the tens of thousands that distract us from the wonder of our surroundings; and social networking sites that invite us to focus on ourselves and our “friends,” rather than on one another and our place in the wider world.2
And yet there is no going back. Once Pandora’s box springs open, we can’t neatly return its contents to the App Store (see here). And once an action is photographed and uploaded, on some level it is no longer “ours.” One can only imagine how the events of 9/11 might have been absorbed and magnified in the age of the cell phone camera, WiFi, and streaming video. How differently might the attacks have traumatized us had the technology existed to allow real-time visualizations of the deaths of hundreds of innocents? How differently might the international community have reacted—or might history have judged the actions of al-Qaeda—had workers, trapped inside the twin towers of the World Trade Center, used the cameras on their handheld devices to record scenes of devastation and carnage, then beamed those photos and videos to their families, or used desktop computers, many of which functioned that morning, to immediately post the atrocities on the Internet? Instead of a panoramic view of mass murder, witnessed from a distance, would we have seen individual lives extinguished one by one, and irrefutably, in the here and now?
