Watching the World Change, page 5
“It continues to be a long haul,” he says. And memories of his experience under the towers remain seared in his psyche. So, too, do his mental images of his fellow photographers. Just prior to the collapse, Handschuh had encountered Glen Pettit, a video cameraman for the New York Police Department. Pettit told Handschuh that he had “unbelievable footage.” Handschuh responded, “Be careful.” They embraced. Then Pettit took off to shoot some more. He was last seen by a fellow officer who remembers him running toward the Trade Center.
Bill Biggart was an intense, impetuous, and driven photographer. “He was Type A-plus-plus,” says his wife, Wendy Doremus. “You either loved him or you hated him. He got arrested at Wounded Knee [the Native American protest site, in 1973], got tear-gassed [and] arrested in the first Intifada [Palestinian uprising] in 1987. He had his press pass taken away covering squatters in New York. He was beaten up by the British police for being a little too close covering the twentieth anniversary of the re-occupation of Northern Ireland. He’s Catholic, Irish, the second oldest of twelve.”
Born in Berlin, the son of a U.S. Army officer, Biggart, according to Doremus, had anticipated the fall of the Berlin Wall by several months, then headed over to cover the celebrations at the Brandenburg Gate that marked the end of the division of Germany in 1989. But no matter the story, he liked to push the limits. “He always ended up too close,” she says. “He’d always get behind the blockades to get inside…He was a pacifist and his family was very much in the Army, so this was his way of compensating…He always took the contrary position. He took the Palestinian side. He was a sailor too. If Palestine ever became a state, he wanted to be one of the first to sail into Gaza harbor, which is mined.”
Biggart, fifty-four, was an old-school freelancer who shot self-assigned stories, concentrating on socially relevant subjects that he considered politically or personally significant. The Impact Visuals photo agency would then sell his images and photo essays to publications such as The Village Voice and The New York Times. Before rushing off to cover the disaster downtown on September 11, he didn’t wait to get a “guarantee” from an editor; he just went. Here was a story that encompassed many of his abiding themes—the Middle East conflict, post–cold war issues, New York City, and fire (two of his siblings had perished in a house fire).
True to form, Biggart got as close as, if not closer than, any other journalist that day. New York Post photographer Bolivar Arellano remembers seeing Biggart directly beneath Tower Two. Though he had been repeatedly kicked out of the area by police, Arellano had slipped past the security cordon and hunkered down, hiding behind a fence so that he could continue shooting, but from a more protected position. He spotted Biggart thirty yards in front of him, and thought, “He’s going to get killed. This guy is too close. He has a telephoto lens…What’s he doing there? I was in the same spot a few minutes before. I was insulting him [in my mind], but I was insulting myself too. A few minutes after that, that tower collapsed.”
Biggart survived that first downfall, however, moving to safer ground, then pressing on through the dust. He had assumed that by sticking with the authorities in charge—the firefighters—he would be assured some measure of protection.
Doremus learned as much when she finally reached him by cell phone. She had walked downtown, hoping to find him somehow. “Everything had stopped,” she says, “all the taxis had their doors opened, [like a scene from] The Day the Earth Stood Still. I got through to him after the first tower went down. I said, ‘This is an attack. Bill, this is dangerous.’ But he was just dismissing me.” He was composed enough to arrange to meet her twenty minutes later, telling her, “I’m safe. I’m with the firemen.”
And that was how they found him. On Saturday, Doremus says, she was informed that her husband’s body had been recovered near the remains of several firefighters. On a follow-up trip to the morgue, she says she was ushered in and told, “‘Come this way.’ There were all his cameras, the film, his keys, his ring, twenty-six dollars, and some cents. In a wet police bag.”
Doremus and a friend, photographer Chip East, pored over the equipment (Image 14). Biggart’s three cameras were thoroughly battered. One roll of color-negative film, showing the first collapse, was intact. One hundred and fifty other shots, on six rolls of 24-exposure Fuji transparency film, survived, though some were streaked with light leaks. Next, they opened his digital camera, a Canon EOS D30, and removed a 256 MB CompactFlash memory card. They dumped the card’s contents onto a computer and could see that Biggart had taken 154 digital photographs—from 9:09.51 a.m. until 10:28.24, according to the time code on the frames—all perfectly intact.
14. Freelance photographer Bill Biggart was killed in the north tower’s collapse. Crews recovered his battered equipment—and some three hundred pictures. (Photograph by Tom McKitterick)
Biggart’s pictures present a step-by-step chronicle of the disaster, literally in the shadows of the towers. A lone bird flies away as Two World Trade Center (the south tower, Tower Two) spews fire. Clots of smoke and cloud stream out as the tower crashes to earth. Debris-cobbled streets suddenly seem desolate as snowdrifts. Storefronts have the gray pallor of corpses. Men in hard hats and helmets, like Arctic explorers caked by hoarfrost, appear imperiled by the elements conspiring around them.
Biggart’s last image, of the splintered stalk of Tower Two, obscured by smoke, was framed just six seconds before the other tower crumbled above him at 10:28 and 31 seconds.
Wendy Doremus feels that her husband, on his last day of shooting, symbolized nothing less than the photo community at a crossroads. “He was at the cusp of photography,” she says. “He took three hundred pictures. Half the film Bill carried that day was digital, half color-negatives and slides. September 11 became the watershed day. After that, [almost all] photographers went digital.”
Doremus claims that she doesn’t linger too often over his September 11 take. “It’s painful for me,” she says, “like looking through his brain, looking through his eyes the last hour and a half of his life.” And yet without any prompting from a visitor, she gravitates to the computer to rummage anyway, four years after that day. She opens the file she keeps on the Mac’s desktop and proceeds to scroll through every last frame. Clicking the mouse, she runs through the sequence, stopping to explain certain moments, to point out certain faces. “He loved crowds,” she observes. “He loved the crossfire. The only thing you can say is: If you gotta go, you might as well go doing what you love the most.”
One of her husband’s last exposures shows a nameless police officer, daubed in dust, with a vexed expression. He is looking up at the lone, remaining tower. “One thing he always taught me,” Biggart’s photographer friend Tom McKitterick would tell Newsweek’s Jerry Adler, “was that sometimes the picture is behind you, in the faces of the people watching.” Shooting the firemen, the exiting workers, the figures cloaked in mysterious gray powder, Biggart was an eyewitness to other eyewitnesses. “In his own way,” Adler would write, “Biggart was a hero as well. He rescued faces.”
The Smithsonian Institution would contact Doremus soon after the attacks. She would agree to loan her husband’s pulverized digital camera.
“I think it was the most photographed event of our time, if not in history,” says curator and writer Michael Shulan.
“It was a photogenic event to an almost unparalleled degree. It had beauty—terrible beauty. It was violent and visually heightened, with an emotional intensity [evident] in every face in the street. If it wasn’t in the frame, the humanity of it hovered around the edges of every picture, just out of view. It [also] coincided with the revolution of digital photography, which was beginning at that moment. This event really ushered in or propelled that revolution. Since then, everything that [has] happened in Afghanistan and Iraq, [along with] the development of the equipment, has made it easier [to photograph]. Digital cameras are used now as visual note-taking devices. Storage is easy now. A still image is a memory bank, if not a memory.”
But on September 11 there was another force at work as well. “It felt so surreal,” insists Shulan, that people “had to photograph it and then look at it in order to validate that it actually happened. You had to record it in order to register that you were there. The photograph as ‘the mediator’ fell away, and you felt you were seeing the event itself when, instead, you were seeing and [then] remembering the photograph.”
Some of the most agonizing images taken that day captured knots of incredulous pedestrians peering up at the towers. There were the two bereaved African American women, shot in extreme close-up, one with her hand to her mouth, the other shielding her eyes, photographed by Angel Franco of The New York Times (Image 7). Their body language spoke volumes: the view outside the frame was too horrifying for words, for sight itself. Then there was the woman with a Canon around her neck, who leaned against a car as she tearfully described the scene to someone on her mobile phone, photographed by Cynthia Colwell, a retired administrator for the Museum of Modern Art, who reluctantly brought her Olympus Stylus with her when she saw neighbors and strangers taking pictures out on Fifth Avenue (Image 8).
7. Two agonized onlookers react to the horror. (Photograph by Angel Franco/The New York Times)
8. News of the attacks sent many New Yorkers into the streets with cameras. Here, a photographer turns away from the disaster to capture a tearful stranger who has set her camera aside. (Photograph by Cynthia Colwell)
Patrick Witty, standing at Park Row and Beekman Street, was five blocks from the site when he turned his lens on a wedge of bystanders, ten of whom stood with mouths agape, several with their heads tilted back or their eyes bulging (Image 9). Shooting in stark black-and-white, the freelance photographer chose to show heads and shoulders only, by stepping up on a curb to get a slightly higher angle on the sweep of the crowd. “The thought process took microseconds,” says Witty, now a picture editor at The New York Times. “How do I not shoot the obvious—the buildings—and shoot my own shock? I saw this cross section of races [and types]: this guy with a suit, this dude, a bike messenger, all together, these faces—this one guy looking disdainful and kind of irritated, this other guy looks kind of euphoric. And the timing of it was serendipity. As I took the picture, Tower Two [the south tower] came down behind me, literally right then.” Witty’s image gives the impression that he has happened upon an utterly spellbound audience, one he might have encountered had he been perched in front of the first row at a horror movie.
9. A knot of bystanders at Park Row and Beekman Street look up as the south tower begins to collapse. (Photograph by Patrick Witty)
Witty, like many photojournalists, would become covered in crust from the fallen rubble, having outrun the domes of debris. He would take pictures of similarly bedecked men and women trudging through the otherworldly swirl. “After emerging from the cloud,” he would write in Double Take magazine, “I photographed one woman who had a huge smile, happy as Christmas morning, covered in dust. She stared right into my lens [and asked], ‘Can I get an eight-by-ten glossy?’” Witty’s reaction today: “She actually asked me it, that way. I thought, That’s so inappropriate and crazy and insane of her to ask me that. But she was in shock.” He believes that her odd delight came from the endorphin rush of having survived a near-death experience and from seeing a photographer magically appear who might allow her to bring home an honest-to-God trophy: Jane Doe—To Hell and Back. “What would she say?” he asks. “She’d survived the worst day in the history of New York.”
Scores of photographers chose to focus on the wounded or on the emergency personnel who rushed to their aid. Susan Watts, of the New York Daily News, was taken with the sight of a businessman cradling a prostrate woman—a total stranger—who appeared to be stroking or grabbing at his chest. Shannon Stapleton, of Reuters, caught the dust-caked figures of five men, materializing as if from a mist (Image 10). Using a metal chair as a makeshift stretcher, they comprise a sort of urban Pietà, carrying the body of Father Mychal Judge, the revered New York Fire Department chaplain, on their way to St. Peter’s Church to set him in the sanctuary there. (A victim of the collapse of the south tower—whose body was listed at the morgue as Victim No. 00001—Father Judge had been blessing the deceased only minutes before.) There were other photographs too layered with misery and meaning to explore just yet. Among them: the images of those who fell from the towers’ windows, many leaping to their deaths to escape the inferno inside. And at day’s end: the picture of three firefighters unfurling the Stars and Stripes above the ruins that would come to be called Ground Zero—among the few truly hopeful images shot on September 11, 2001.
10. Out of the wreckage of the south tower, first responders carry the body of Father Mychal Judge, the FDNY chaplain, to St. Peter’s Church. (Photograph by Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)
“Hopeful” is a relative term. Dozens of people that day had the impulse to photograph their loved ones or their neighbors or the unknown companions who happened to be watching the trauma with them. Unconsciously, they were making a choice. They thought it important to treat other witnesses—not the catastrophe—as the subject of their photos. They were not merely standing back and observing the events passively, but were rendering, unconsciously, why the calamity mattered.
With the towers belching white smoke behind her, Isabel Daser, a German-born, New York–based architect (and amateur pilot) requested that a coworker photograph her—eight months pregnant with her daughter, Amelia (born three weeks later and named after Amelia Earhart). Daser, in rotund profile, stares at the camera with an inscrutable Mona Lisa expression, standing near Twenty-third Street on Sixth Avenue (Image 11). “At this moment we didn’t realize that it was a terror act,” she explains in an e-mail from her new home in Zurich. “I flew around ‘the twins’ myself in a Cessna several times before. So I asked my colleague to take this picture. You can tell by my face that I didn’t want to smile, as you normally do in pictures. I know that many hobby pilots take pictures while being on the commands at the same time. So I could imagine one ‘tourist pilot’ having an accident. We didn’t know the truth yet.”
11. Not yet realizing a terrorist attack was in progress, architect Isabel Daser, eight months pregnant, asked a coworker to take her portrait as a record of the day. (Photograph courtesy of Isabel Daser Bessler)
Artist Michelle Chojecki stood on her roof with a camera and keyed her lens on the confusion in the face of her neighbor’s sixteen-month-old son, Zion, letting the towers behind him go out of focus. “I was wondering what the baby might be thinking about all the commotion,” Chojecki now says. Instead of shooting the event, which she calls “too huge to conceive,” she grounded herself by peering into the eyes of a child being embraced by its mother.
In the moments after both towers had fallen, photographer Alex Webb noticed Jenna Piccirillo and her three-month-old son, Vaughan, on a roof in Brooklyn Heights, the baby wincing in sunlight in his portable infant seat. Behind him loomed a skyline bathed in gray (Image 12).
12. On a Brooklyn rooftop, shortly after the collapse of the twin towers, Jenna Piccirillo and three-month-old Vaughan embody innocence and resilience, according to the photographer: “Life continues in the face of disaster…despite the horrors we inflict on one another.” (Photograph © Alex Webb/Magnum Photos)
Each face had been set against a monstrous backdrop, as if the photographers had felt compelled to shoot the terror in context—in relation to the innocents it had been intended to terrify. They were studies of mothers and children, not urban grotesqueries. And many, in their way, projected the innocent act of getting on with one’s existence. The portraits were implying not fragility or defeat, but an affirmation of the cycle of human life, a hint of reassurance. Webb says that his image of Jenna and Vaughan—“a tender moment between mother and child, and Manhattan in the distance, wreathed in smoke—[captures] a kind of incongruity which I often feel exists in situations of strife and which is often ignored: life continues in the face of disaster…despite the horrors we inflict on one another. [The picture] also provide[s] some questions: What kind of world is this child being born into? What does the future hold?”
And then there was Jerry Spagnoli. For months, he had been engaged in a photo documentation project, recording modern New York landmarks by using a photographic tool introduced in 1839: the daguerreotype. That Tuesday, upon seeing the disaster from his window, Spagnoli, an expert in nineteenth-century photographic processes, decided to lug a giant wooden view camera to his Chelsea rooftop. He also brought along a daguerreotype plate. On that morning, he left the camera’s shutter open for three full seconds, and on a bulky sheet of silver-plated copper he etched a vista in black-and-white (actually in silver crystals on a mirror-finished sheet of polished silver). The image had a haunting, almost tactile sharpness: quiet streets, two old water towers, One World Trade Center raked with smoke on the horizon as the south tower disappeared in a squall of white (Image 13). Spagnoli had recorded the September attacks by employing the same medium with which Americans some 160 years before had first documented the nation’s towns and cities.
13. An expert in nineteenth-century photographic techniques brought a wooden view camera and a daguerreotype plate to his Chelsea rooftop, making a three-second exposure as the south tower disappeared on the horizon. (Photograph by Jerry Spagnoli)
Viewers can behold Spagnoli’s faux-vintage image and unconsciously process the destruction as part of a continuum of conflict. “Seen in isolation,” he says, “the event is too awful. But it’s inherently empowering to know that, given human history, incredibly awful things do occur, and then we go on.” Spagnoli finds a certain solace in having resorted to an antiquated technology. “I used a material which visually alludes to previous events,” he explains. “You see it and you think, ‘Civil War, the San Francisco earthquake’ [though neither was recorded by daguerreotypists]. The manner in which the photograph is made, and then experienced, provides the viewer with a context for the scene. The daguerreotype compresses the precedents.”
