Watching the World Change, page 57
Rambousek, Jindra
Rambousek, Luke
Rambousek, Mike
Rasweiler, Mark
Rather, Dan
Ratner, Bruce
Reagan, Ronald
“real time,”
Reardon, Nan
“Recovery” (2003 exhibition)
Red Cross
Reel New York
Regan, Donald
Regan, Ken
Regan, Peter
relief funds
religion
remains, human; identifications; recovery of; unidentified
Remy, Eddie
Reporters Without Borders
Republican National Convention (2004)
Rescorla, Rick
Rescorla, Susan
rescue workers
Reuters
Reyes, Jaime
Ribowsky, Shiya
Rice, Condoleezza
Rich, Frank
Richards, Danielle
Richards, Eugene
Richards, Michael
Riefenstahl, Leni
Ritchin, Fred
Rivera, Isaias
Robertson, Nic
Robins, Wayne
Rodin sculptures
Rogan, Matt
Rolling Stone
Rosenbaum, Steven
Rosenthal, Joe; Iwo Jima photo
Rove, Karl
RTR
Ruiz i Altaba, Ariel
Rumsfeld, Donald
Rushdie, Salman
Russert, Tim
Russia
S
Safire, William
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
St. Paul’s Chapel
St. Vincent’s Hospital
Salamone, John
Salamone, MaryEllen
Salgado, Sebastiao
Sandeen, Eric
San Francisco Chronicle
Sante, Luc
Sapir, Ira
satellite-delivered images
Saudi Arabia
Sawon, Magda
Schanberg, Sydney
Schiffren, Lisa
Schneider, Jeffrey
Schoenfeld, Trevor
Schorr, Daniel
Schwartz, Ivan
Schwittek, Sara K.
Scoopt
Scott-Heron, Gil
Scurto, Joe
security
Sella, Marshall
September 11 (Tuesday)
September 11 Digital Archive project
September 11 Photo Project, The (book)
“September 11th: Bearing Witness to History” (exhibition)
September 12 (Wednesday)
September 13 (Thursday)
September 14 (Friday)
September 15 (Saturday)
September 16 (Sunday)
September 17 (Monday)
September’s Mission
VII
7 Days in September (film)
Seven World Trade Center
Sexton, Brian
Shakespeare, William; As You Like It
Shaler, Robert
Share, Sam
Shaughnessy, Kristen
Sheirer, Richard
Shelton, General Hugh
Shepard, Eliot
Sherman, Tim
Shine, Bill
Shribman, David
Shulan, Michael
Silverman, Ben
Simon, Joel
Simon, Steve
Sischy, Ingrid
60 Minutes II
skyline, post 9/11
Sky TV
Smiouskas, Richard
Smith, Frank Percy
Smith, Mike
Smith, W. Eugene
Smithsonian Institution; 9/11 artifacts at
snapshots
Somalia
Sontag, Susan; On Photography; Regarding the Pain of Others
Sony cameras
south tower (Tower Two); collapse of; impact of plane on
space-based photography
Spagnoli, Jerry
Speer, Albert
Spell, Jennifer
Spence, Roy
Spitzer, Eliot
Staehle, Wolfgang
Stanmeyer, John
Stapleton, Shannon
Starn, Mike and Doug
Staten Island; Fresh Kills Landfill
Statue of Liberty
Steckman, William
Steichen, Edward, The Family of Man
Stephenson, Michele
Stern, Nikki
Sternfeld, Joel
Stewart, James B., Heart of a Soldier
Stieglitz, Alfred
Stillman, Deanne
Stone, Oliver
Strock, George
structural engineering
Stuyvesant High School
sublime, the
subway
Suhr, Danny
suicide bombers
Sullivan, James
surveillance; counterterror; racism and
survivors
Suson, Gary
Swofford, Anthony, Jarhead
Sygma
T
Tabeek, George
Taliban
Tannenbaum, Allan
tattoos
Taylor, Carmen
television; advertising; crawl; disturbing-image policy and self-censorship; images of World Trade Center removed from entertainment programming; as instrument of political accountability; Iraq War coverage; limits of; marathon coverage of 9/11; news teams; role in 9/11; “satelliting,”; transmitters; see also specific networks and programs
Tenet, George
Theodore Roosevelt, USS
Thing, The
Tiananmen Square massacre (1985)
Time; special 9/11 issue
Time Inc.
time-lapse film
Times Square
Time Warner
TomPaine.com
Toole, Mike
Tora Bora
Torgovnik, Jonathan
tourism, Ground Zero
“Tourist Guy,”
Towell, Larry
Traub, Charles
Travis, David
Trevor, Claudia
Trinity Church
Trost (Cathy) and Shepard (Alicia C.), Running Toward Danger
Trow, George W. S.
tsunami (2004)
Tuchman, Gary
Tuckner, Howard
Tumayev, Vova
Turner, Ted
Turnley, David
twin-beams-of-light memorial
“2001” (exhibition)
U
UAVs
Uman, Jonathan
Underground Zero (film)
Union Square
United Airlines Flight 93
United Airlines Flight 175
United Nations
United 93 (film)
“Unknown Quantities” (exhibition)
Updike, John
Up documentary series
USA Today
Ut, Nick
V
Valiquette, Joe
Vanity Fair
Velazquez, Jorge
Vesey Street
VH1
Viacom
video; al-Qaeda’s use of; digital; of “jumpers,”; news; surveillance
Vietnam Veterans Memorial
Vietnam War
Village Voice, The
Virilio, Paul
Visa pour l’Image
Von Essen, Roddy
Von Essen, Thomas
W
Waldman, Amy
Waldman, Sacha
Walker, Stanley
Wall, Amy
walls, “missing,”
Wall Street; first workweek after 9/11
Wall Street Journal, The
Walters, Barbara
wartime casualties; American aversion to pictures of
Washington Post, The
Washington Times, The
Watson, James
Watts, Stan
Watts, Susan
weapons of mass destruction
weathercam
weather satellites
Web; see also Internet
Webb, Alex
Webcams
Webster, William
wedding photography
Weiser, Judy
Weiss, Ann, The Last Album
Weisskopf, Michael
Welch, Nathaniel
Wells, Carol
Wenzelberg, Charlie
Westendorf, Cindi
Westin, David
West Side Highway
West Street
Whitaker, Jim
White, E. B.
White House; Iraq War policy and images; response to 9/11
Wiener, Robert
Wieseltier, Leon
Williams, Brian
Windows on the World
Winfrey, Oprah
wire services
Witty, Patrick
WNYW-TV
Wolcott, James
Wolff, Michael
Woodward, Adam
Woodward, Bob; Bush at War
Woodward, Richard B.
World Picture News
World Trade Center; collapse of; construction of; impact of planes on; 1993 bombing of; photographic appeal of; scale of; as symbol of western economic supremacy; transmitters; see also north tower (Tower One); south tower (Tower Two)
World Trade Center (film)
World Trade Center Memorial Foundation
World War II; Iwo Jima flag photo
Worth, Alexi
WPIX
Y
Yedioth Ahronoth
Yousef, Ramzi
Z
Zakaria, Fareed
Zelizer, Barbie
Zirinsky, Susan
Permissions Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following previously published material:
Excerpts from David Friend, “Bond of Brothers,” Vanity Fair, March 2002, p. 182, and David Friend, “Two Towers, One Year Later,” Vanity Fair, September 2002, p. 326. Copyright © 2002 Condé Nast Publications. All rights reserved. Originally published in Vanity Fair. Reprinted by permission.
Excerpts from David Friend, “A War Waged in Images,” first appeared in American Photo, September/October 2003. Copyright © David Friend. Courtesy Hachette Filipacchi Media.
Excerpts from David Friend, “America’s Darkest Day,” The Digital Journalist, October 2001. Copyright © David Friend.
Excerpts from “Portraits of Grief” for Calvin Gooding and Glen Pettit copyright © 2001 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission of The New York Times and of the victims’ families.
Excerpt from “At a School in Russia, a World of Emptiness,” by Seth Mydans, copyright © 2004 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission.
Excerpt from “The Falling Man,” by Tom Junod, used with permission of the author. Originally published in Esquire.
Excerpt from “Seeing the Horror: James Nachtwey,” The Digital Journalist, October 2001, used with permission from Peter Howe and Dirck Halstead, The Digital Journalist.
Excerpt from “The Unbearable Relevance of Photography,” by Fred Ritchin, used with permission of the author. Originally published in Aperture #171, Summer 2003, copyright © Fred Ritchin 2003.
Lyrics from “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” by Gil Scott Heron, copyright © 1971 Binestock Publishing Company. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from “The Height of Myth-Making,” by Philip Kennicott, copyright © 2003 The Washington Post Company. Excerpted with permission.
WATCHING THE WORLD CHANGE. Copyright © 2006 by David Friend.
Preface copyright © 2011 by David Friend.
All rights reserved. For information, address
Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.picadorusa.com
Picador® is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by Farrar, Straus and Giroux under license from Pan Books Limited.
For information on Picador Reading Group Guides, please contact Picador.
E-mail: readinggroupguides@picadorusa.com
Owing to limitations of space, all acknowledgments for permission to print previously published material appear on page 437.
Frontispiece photograph by Kelly Price/Polaris
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Friend, David, 1955–
Watching the world change: the stories behind the images of 9/11 /
David Friend.—2nd Picador ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-3315-5
1. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001. 2. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001—Pictorial works. 3. World Trade Center (New York, N.Y.)—Pictorial works. 4. Terrorism—New York (State)—New York—Pictorial works. 5. Documentary photography. I. Title.
HV6432.7.F75 2011
974.7'1044—dc22
2011021172
First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
1 So, too, have the terrorists. Al-Qaeda has an active online presence, using its Web site and video feeds to get out its message and to recruit jihadists. And new technologies have also empowered the mentally unhinged. In 2007, for example, the student who went on a killing spree at Virginia Tech, claiming the lives of thirty-three students and faculty members, stopped in the middle of the rampage to package up a bundle of self-recorded QuickTime videos and forty-three photographs, stop at the local post office, and ship what amounted to a high-tech suicide note to NBC News.
2 Part of the problem is the sheer volume of data that we generate and navigate. So much content is seeding the big digital cloud around us that last year Doug Webster, who helps monitor Internet trends for Cisco Systems, noted that one of the old measurements of data traffic—petabytes—was already outmoded, having been replaced by zettabytes. “And now,” remarked Webster, “we’re measuring them in what we call yottabytes.” (One petabyte, explains John Markoff in The New York Times, “is equivalent to one million gigabytes. A zettabyte is a million petabytes. And a yottabyte is a thousand zettabytes.”) What’s more, according to a 2010 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, every day the average American kid, multitasking as he goes, now consumes over ten hours of media content daily—in 7.5 hours. That’s a jump of more than two hours since this book was first published, in 2006 (pp. 221–2; 385).
3 NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, roughly a half hour into the event, mentioned that the “best-known suspect is Osama bin Laden…in Afghanistan.” Likewise, Jim Stewart of CBS commented that officials “specifically believe this is the work of Osama bin Laden.”
4 By comparison, 85.6 million watched during the first day of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 1991—an event that had been anticipated for months.
5 When men first landed on the Moon, in 1969, 40 million American households tuned in, a number equivalent to today’s annual U.S. audience for the Academy Awards. The Super Bowl has been known to draw viewers in nearly 150 million American households. Though it is often noted that a billion people, worldwide, watch the Super Bowl or the Oscar ceremony each year, that figure is difficult to calculate reliably.
6 Osama bin Laden, in contrast, monitored the attacks via radio; so he claimed in a 2001 video.
7 Al-Jazeera is the provocative Middle Eastern channel, launched in 1996, that serves a pan-Arab audience of 40 million from its base in Qatar, the Persian Gulf emirate, having recently mobilized an international English-language service. Its influence has grown so widely since the Iraq War that in 2004 it was named the fifth most impactful global brand—after Apple, Google, IKEA, and Starbucks—in Brandchannel.com’s Readers’ Choice Awards.
8 The government would also begin a widespread surveillance campaign aimed at Americans or foreigners on U.S. soil suspected of having contacts with al-Qaeda. In time, the ACLU would contend that the FBI had begun monitoring antiwar, religious, and even environmental organizations, and a New York Times probe would report that the National Security Agency—without receiving court warrants or typical congressional consent—had started eavesdropping on thousands of phone calls and Internet exchanges. (In this Orwellian environment, wrote Times columnist Maureen Dowd, it was fitting that Google, the Internet search engine that offers satellite or aerial pictures of many American homes, had deliberately obscured its online photo of the residence of Vice President Cheney, whom Dowd is fond of calling Vice or, on occasion, the Grim Peeper. “Vice,” said Dowd, “has [already] turned America into a camera obscura, a dark chamber with a lens that turns things upside down.”)
9 Those who leaped or fell from the highest floors struck the ground in about ten seconds.
10 The covers Owerko had landed, in contrast, were mainly for music-industry trade magazines.
11 In one of the most perplexing developments surrounding September 11–related imagery, the New York Daily News would report in 2006 that Brown, retaining the copyright to 30,000 photographs he took at FEMA’s behest, had also taken video and “included part of the footage in a wacky documentary, ‘Words,’ surrounding scenes of Trade Center death and destruction with interviews of topless women talking about society’s obsession with breasts and a group of New Yorkers traipsing around nude as part of a simulated Native American Ceremony.” Brown defends his movie. “The premise of ‘Words’ comes from the idea of word association. The film moves from one topic to the next based on the connections between people, ideas, emotions. We began shooting ‘Words’ in 2000. Then, 9/11 happened…It would have been dishonest not to include [such imagery].”
12 Bush’s photo would be similarly bandied about. At one Indonesian rally, mobs hefted a poster-board effigy of the president, replete with fangs, a “Big Satan” bandana, and a makeshift nameplate: Bush Dog.
13 The Bush administration strongly cautioned U.S. media outlets against broadcasting lengthy excerpts from bin Laden’s videos, warning that they might contain secret signals, possibly instructing his followers to initiate terror attacks.
14 The average U.S. household has 2.4 TVs. Fifty percent of Americans live in homes with a digital camera. Seventy-three percent live in homes with one computer or more, and the typical Internet user in those homes devotes the equivalent of four full days every month to online pursuits. As of 2006, 50 million working cell phones in the United States had cameras in them; 125 million were able to access the Web. Smartphones, handhelds, and iPods (which in 2006 sold at a rate of one per second, worldwide) also allow consumers to surf the Net or view videos. All told, there are 1 billion PCs, 1.5 billion televisions, and 2 billion mobile devices on the planet.
15 Jumbo jets, oil (in the form of 60,000 gallons of jet fuel), and massive edifices (the Pentagon and Trade towers representing three of the planet’s largest structures).
Rambousek, Luke
Rambousek, Mike
Rasweiler, Mark
Rather, Dan
Ratner, Bruce
Reagan, Ronald
“real time,”
Reardon, Nan
“Recovery” (2003 exhibition)
Red Cross
Reel New York
Regan, Donald
Regan, Ken
Regan, Peter
relief funds
religion
remains, human; identifications; recovery of; unidentified
Remy, Eddie
Reporters Without Borders
Republican National Convention (2004)
Rescorla, Rick
Rescorla, Susan
rescue workers
Reuters
Reyes, Jaime
Ribowsky, Shiya
Rice, Condoleezza
Rich, Frank
Richards, Danielle
Richards, Eugene
Richards, Michael
Riefenstahl, Leni
Ritchin, Fred
Rivera, Isaias
Robertson, Nic
Robins, Wayne
Rodin sculptures
Rogan, Matt
Rolling Stone
Rosenbaum, Steven
Rosenthal, Joe; Iwo Jima photo
Rove, Karl
RTR
Ruiz i Altaba, Ariel
Rumsfeld, Donald
Rushdie, Salman
Russert, Tim
Russia
S
Safire, William
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
St. Paul’s Chapel
St. Vincent’s Hospital
Salamone, John
Salamone, MaryEllen
Salgado, Sebastiao
Sandeen, Eric
San Francisco Chronicle
Sante, Luc
Sapir, Ira
satellite-delivered images
Saudi Arabia
Sawon, Magda
Schanberg, Sydney
Schiffren, Lisa
Schneider, Jeffrey
Schoenfeld, Trevor
Schorr, Daniel
Schwartz, Ivan
Schwittek, Sara K.
Scoopt
Scott-Heron, Gil
Scurto, Joe
security
Sella, Marshall
September 11 (Tuesday)
September 11 Digital Archive project
September 11 Photo Project, The (book)
“September 11th: Bearing Witness to History” (exhibition)
September 12 (Wednesday)
September 13 (Thursday)
September 14 (Friday)
September 15 (Saturday)
September 16 (Sunday)
September 17 (Monday)
September’s Mission
VII
7 Days in September (film)
Seven World Trade Center
Sexton, Brian
Shakespeare, William; As You Like It
Shaler, Robert
Share, Sam
Shaughnessy, Kristen
Sheirer, Richard
Shelton, General Hugh
Shepard, Eliot
Sherman, Tim
Shine, Bill
Shribman, David
Shulan, Michael
Silverman, Ben
Simon, Joel
Simon, Steve
Sischy, Ingrid
60 Minutes II
skyline, post 9/11
Sky TV
Smiouskas, Richard
Smith, Frank Percy
Smith, Mike
Smith, W. Eugene
Smithsonian Institution; 9/11 artifacts at
snapshots
Somalia
Sontag, Susan; On Photography; Regarding the Pain of Others
Sony cameras
south tower (Tower Two); collapse of; impact of plane on
space-based photography
Spagnoli, Jerry
Speer, Albert
Spell, Jennifer
Spence, Roy
Spitzer, Eliot
Staehle, Wolfgang
Stanmeyer, John
Stapleton, Shannon
Starn, Mike and Doug
Staten Island; Fresh Kills Landfill
Statue of Liberty
Steckman, William
Steichen, Edward, The Family of Man
Stephenson, Michele
Stern, Nikki
Sternfeld, Joel
Stewart, James B., Heart of a Soldier
Stieglitz, Alfred
Stillman, Deanne
Stone, Oliver
Strock, George
structural engineering
Stuyvesant High School
sublime, the
subway
Suhr, Danny
suicide bombers
Sullivan, James
surveillance; counterterror; racism and
survivors
Suson, Gary
Swofford, Anthony, Jarhead
Sygma
T
Tabeek, George
Taliban
Tannenbaum, Allan
tattoos
Taylor, Carmen
television; advertising; crawl; disturbing-image policy and self-censorship; images of World Trade Center removed from entertainment programming; as instrument of political accountability; Iraq War coverage; limits of; marathon coverage of 9/11; news teams; role in 9/11; “satelliting,”; transmitters; see also specific networks and programs
Tenet, George
Theodore Roosevelt, USS
Thing, The
Tiananmen Square massacre (1985)
Time; special 9/11 issue
Time Inc.
time-lapse film
Times Square
Time Warner
TomPaine.com
Toole, Mike
Tora Bora
Torgovnik, Jonathan
tourism, Ground Zero
“Tourist Guy,”
Towell, Larry
Traub, Charles
Travis, David
Trevor, Claudia
Trinity Church
Trost (Cathy) and Shepard (Alicia C.), Running Toward Danger
Trow, George W. S.
tsunami (2004)
Tuchman, Gary
Tuckner, Howard
Tumayev, Vova
Turner, Ted
Turnley, David
twin-beams-of-light memorial
“2001” (exhibition)
U
UAVs
Uman, Jonathan
Underground Zero (film)
Union Square
United Airlines Flight 93
United Airlines Flight 175
United Nations
United 93 (film)
“Unknown Quantities” (exhibition)
Updike, John
Up documentary series
USA Today
Ut, Nick
V
Valiquette, Joe
Vanity Fair
Velazquez, Jorge
Vesey Street
VH1
Viacom
video; al-Qaeda’s use of; digital; of “jumpers,”; news; surveillance
Vietnam Veterans Memorial
Vietnam War
Village Voice, The
Virilio, Paul
Visa pour l’Image
Von Essen, Roddy
Von Essen, Thomas
W
Waldman, Amy
Waldman, Sacha
Walker, Stanley
Wall, Amy
walls, “missing,”
Wall Street; first workweek after 9/11
Wall Street Journal, The
Walters, Barbara
wartime casualties; American aversion to pictures of
Washington Post, The
Washington Times, The
Watson, James
Watts, Stan
Watts, Susan
weapons of mass destruction
weathercam
weather satellites
Web; see also Internet
Webb, Alex
Webcams
Webster, William
wedding photography
Weiser, Judy
Weiss, Ann, The Last Album
Weisskopf, Michael
Welch, Nathaniel
Wells, Carol
Wenzelberg, Charlie
Westendorf, Cindi
Westin, David
West Side Highway
West Street
Whitaker, Jim
White, E. B.
White House; Iraq War policy and images; response to 9/11
Wiener, Robert
Wieseltier, Leon
Williams, Brian
Windows on the World
Winfrey, Oprah
wire services
Witty, Patrick
WNYW-TV
Wolcott, James
Wolff, Michael
Woodward, Adam
Woodward, Bob; Bush at War
Woodward, Richard B.
World Picture News
World Trade Center; collapse of; construction of; impact of planes on; 1993 bombing of; photographic appeal of; scale of; as symbol of western economic supremacy; transmitters; see also north tower (Tower One); south tower (Tower Two)
World Trade Center (film)
World Trade Center Memorial Foundation
World War II; Iwo Jima flag photo
Worth, Alexi
WPIX
Y
Yedioth Ahronoth
Yousef, Ramzi
Z
Zakaria, Fareed
Zelizer, Barbie
Zirinsky, Susan
Permissions Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following previously published material:
Excerpts from David Friend, “Bond of Brothers,” Vanity Fair, March 2002, p. 182, and David Friend, “Two Towers, One Year Later,” Vanity Fair, September 2002, p. 326. Copyright © 2002 Condé Nast Publications. All rights reserved. Originally published in Vanity Fair. Reprinted by permission.
Excerpts from David Friend, “A War Waged in Images,” first appeared in American Photo, September/October 2003. Copyright © David Friend. Courtesy Hachette Filipacchi Media.
Excerpts from David Friend, “America’s Darkest Day,” The Digital Journalist, October 2001. Copyright © David Friend.
Excerpts from “Portraits of Grief” for Calvin Gooding and Glen Pettit copyright © 2001 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission of The New York Times and of the victims’ families.
Excerpt from “At a School in Russia, a World of Emptiness,” by Seth Mydans, copyright © 2004 by The New York Times Co. Reprinted with permission.
Excerpt from “The Falling Man,” by Tom Junod, used with permission of the author. Originally published in Esquire.
Excerpt from “Seeing the Horror: James Nachtwey,” The Digital Journalist, October 2001, used with permission from Peter Howe and Dirck Halstead, The Digital Journalist.
Excerpt from “The Unbearable Relevance of Photography,” by Fred Ritchin, used with permission of the author. Originally published in Aperture #171, Summer 2003, copyright © Fred Ritchin 2003.
Lyrics from “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” by Gil Scott Heron, copyright © 1971 Binestock Publishing Company. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Excerpt from “The Height of Myth-Making,” by Philip Kennicott, copyright © 2003 The Washington Post Company. Excerpted with permission.
WATCHING THE WORLD CHANGE. Copyright © 2006 by David Friend.
Preface copyright © 2011 by David Friend.
All rights reserved. For information, address
Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.picadorusa.com
Picador® is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by Farrar, Straus and Giroux under license from Pan Books Limited.
For information on Picador Reading Group Guides, please contact Picador.
E-mail: readinggroupguides@picadorusa.com
Owing to limitations of space, all acknowledgments for permission to print previously published material appear on page 437.
Frontispiece photograph by Kelly Price/Polaris
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Friend, David, 1955–
Watching the world change: the stories behind the images of 9/11 /
David Friend.—2nd Picador ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-3315-5
1. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001. 2. September 11 Terrorist Attacks, 2001—Pictorial works. 3. World Trade Center (New York, N.Y.)—Pictorial works. 4. Terrorism—New York (State)—New York—Pictorial works. 5. Documentary photography. I. Title.
HV6432.7.F75 2011
974.7'1044—dc22
2011021172
First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
1 So, too, have the terrorists. Al-Qaeda has an active online presence, using its Web site and video feeds to get out its message and to recruit jihadists. And new technologies have also empowered the mentally unhinged. In 2007, for example, the student who went on a killing spree at Virginia Tech, claiming the lives of thirty-three students and faculty members, stopped in the middle of the rampage to package up a bundle of self-recorded QuickTime videos and forty-three photographs, stop at the local post office, and ship what amounted to a high-tech suicide note to NBC News.
2 Part of the problem is the sheer volume of data that we generate and navigate. So much content is seeding the big digital cloud around us that last year Doug Webster, who helps monitor Internet trends for Cisco Systems, noted that one of the old measurements of data traffic—petabytes—was already outmoded, having been replaced by zettabytes. “And now,” remarked Webster, “we’re measuring them in what we call yottabytes.” (One petabyte, explains John Markoff in The New York Times, “is equivalent to one million gigabytes. A zettabyte is a million petabytes. And a yottabyte is a thousand zettabytes.”) What’s more, according to a 2010 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, every day the average American kid, multitasking as he goes, now consumes over ten hours of media content daily—in 7.5 hours. That’s a jump of more than two hours since this book was first published, in 2006 (pp. 221–2; 385).
3 NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, roughly a half hour into the event, mentioned that the “best-known suspect is Osama bin Laden…in Afghanistan.” Likewise, Jim Stewart of CBS commented that officials “specifically believe this is the work of Osama bin Laden.”
4 By comparison, 85.6 million watched during the first day of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 1991—an event that had been anticipated for months.
5 When men first landed on the Moon, in 1969, 40 million American households tuned in, a number equivalent to today’s annual U.S. audience for the Academy Awards. The Super Bowl has been known to draw viewers in nearly 150 million American households. Though it is often noted that a billion people, worldwide, watch the Super Bowl or the Oscar ceremony each year, that figure is difficult to calculate reliably.
6 Osama bin Laden, in contrast, monitored the attacks via radio; so he claimed in a 2001 video.
7 Al-Jazeera is the provocative Middle Eastern channel, launched in 1996, that serves a pan-Arab audience of 40 million from its base in Qatar, the Persian Gulf emirate, having recently mobilized an international English-language service. Its influence has grown so widely since the Iraq War that in 2004 it was named the fifth most impactful global brand—after Apple, Google, IKEA, and Starbucks—in Brandchannel.com’s Readers’ Choice Awards.
8 The government would also begin a widespread surveillance campaign aimed at Americans or foreigners on U.S. soil suspected of having contacts with al-Qaeda. In time, the ACLU would contend that the FBI had begun monitoring antiwar, religious, and even environmental organizations, and a New York Times probe would report that the National Security Agency—without receiving court warrants or typical congressional consent—had started eavesdropping on thousands of phone calls and Internet exchanges. (In this Orwellian environment, wrote Times columnist Maureen Dowd, it was fitting that Google, the Internet search engine that offers satellite or aerial pictures of many American homes, had deliberately obscured its online photo of the residence of Vice President Cheney, whom Dowd is fond of calling Vice or, on occasion, the Grim Peeper. “Vice,” said Dowd, “has [already] turned America into a camera obscura, a dark chamber with a lens that turns things upside down.”)
9 Those who leaped or fell from the highest floors struck the ground in about ten seconds.
10 The covers Owerko had landed, in contrast, were mainly for music-industry trade magazines.
11 In one of the most perplexing developments surrounding September 11–related imagery, the New York Daily News would report in 2006 that Brown, retaining the copyright to 30,000 photographs he took at FEMA’s behest, had also taken video and “included part of the footage in a wacky documentary, ‘Words,’ surrounding scenes of Trade Center death and destruction with interviews of topless women talking about society’s obsession with breasts and a group of New Yorkers traipsing around nude as part of a simulated Native American Ceremony.” Brown defends his movie. “The premise of ‘Words’ comes from the idea of word association. The film moves from one topic to the next based on the connections between people, ideas, emotions. We began shooting ‘Words’ in 2000. Then, 9/11 happened…It would have been dishonest not to include [such imagery].”
12 Bush’s photo would be similarly bandied about. At one Indonesian rally, mobs hefted a poster-board effigy of the president, replete with fangs, a “Big Satan” bandana, and a makeshift nameplate: Bush Dog.
13 The Bush administration strongly cautioned U.S. media outlets against broadcasting lengthy excerpts from bin Laden’s videos, warning that they might contain secret signals, possibly instructing his followers to initiate terror attacks.
14 The average U.S. household has 2.4 TVs. Fifty percent of Americans live in homes with a digital camera. Seventy-three percent live in homes with one computer or more, and the typical Internet user in those homes devotes the equivalent of four full days every month to online pursuits. As of 2006, 50 million working cell phones in the United States had cameras in them; 125 million were able to access the Web. Smartphones, handhelds, and iPods (which in 2006 sold at a rate of one per second, worldwide) also allow consumers to surf the Net or view videos. All told, there are 1 billion PCs, 1.5 billion televisions, and 2 billion mobile devices on the planet.
15 Jumbo jets, oil (in the form of 60,000 gallons of jet fuel), and massive edifices (the Pentagon and Trade towers representing three of the planet’s largest structures).
