Images of Terror: Enduring the Scars of 9/11

...Two minutes later CNN, the Cable News Network, delivered the 9/11 story to the country and shortly after that to the world...

...The statue, labeled “a larger-than-life rendition of a grotesque episode” by its most outspoken critic, New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser, was soon covered and screened off by Rockefeller Center officials, who realized that the public did not want a new version of falling man...

...The number of people who jumped from the World Trade Center was put at fifty by the New York Times, which used videotapes to arrive at its total, and at more than two hundred by USA Today, which relied on eyewitness accounts as well as videotapes...

...It just was...

...The response of those on the ground who were frightened was deeply visceral, but it was also a reminder of how quickly the images of 9/11 became a political asset for a Bush administration eager to take the country into war with Iraq...

...You are looking at a very disturbing shot here...

...He is physically composed and appears stoical about the certain death awaiting him...

...CNN’s domestic coverage was beamed beyond the United States to 170 million households in more than two hundred countries...

...He had small weak eyes that glinted with a kind of crazy lust and were usually set off by big goggles...

...Anyone would have jumped under the conditions created by 9/11, and the idea of trying to explore motive defied basic decency, as did the idea of trying to turn the deaths of those who had jumped from the World Trade Center into art...

...Their strategy worked, but as papers throughout the western United States got the photo, they quickly began remaking their front pages...

...They showed loved ones at a happy moments in their lives, enjoying a time to be remembered...

...The Record mailed out thirty thousand copies of Franklin’s picture to those who requested copies of it...

...Eventually nearly two thousand portraits ran in the paper before being collected in a 2002 book, Portraits 9/11/01, that brought the Times a Pulitzer Prize for public service for the section of its paper, A Nation Challenged, in which “Portraits of Grief” appeared...

...The captions next to the photos —“Jack of Many Trades,” “A Caring Klutz,” “Friend of the Far Side,” “Love Behind the Wheel”—were lighthearted rather than somber, closer in tone to a graduation yearbook than a traditional obituary...

...This empathy was heightened by journalists looking to identify the falling man...

...Franklin’s flag photo would not remain free from controversy...

...The actions of New York City officials had a similar effect...

...Franklin immediately drove to Jersey City’s Exchange Place, and from a point near the Hudson River shore, he spent the next two hours taking pictures of the burning Twin Towers and the boatloads of fleeing workers arriving back from Manhattan by ferry...

...Even then the destruction that American movie audiences got to see was limited...

...The unveiling met with widespread protest...

...There is, as Leon Wieseltier wrote in the New Republic, a “terrifying dignity” to Drew’s falling man...

...But the pictures of 9/11 that after Drew’s and Franklin’s had the biggest impact on the country were the work of ordinary men and women who lost loved ones at Ground Zero and immediately began posting their loved ones’ pictures on fliers in the hope that somebody might supply information about what had happened to them...

...11, 2001,” and in publishing his photo on page seven of its September 12 edition, the New York Times ran it with the lengthy caption, “A person falls headfirst after jumping from the north tower of the World Trade Center...

...The feelings of revulsion and anger that these pictures produced in America were immediate...

...As Drew later observed in a Los Angeles Times op-ed that he wrote on falling man, “He is you and me...

...The response to both rounds of missing fliers duplicated the spirit in which they were posted...

...What made the photograph so horrifying to most Americans and so central to 9/11 culture was that it evoked empathy rather than sympathy...

...Three of the world’s best-known photojournalists, Susan Meiselas, Gilles Peress, and James Nachtwey, were in New York on September 11 and produced indelible images of the horror at Ground Zero...

...On the first anniversary of 9/11, Rockefeller Center sought to memorialize the day’s tragedies by unveiling Eric Fischl’s “Tumbling Woman,” a bronze statue of a naked woman, with her arms and legs flailing above her head, falling to her death...

...His toothy mouth was filled with oversized incisors...

...When they found a large flagpole sticking up from a pile of rubble about twenty feet high on West Street, they knew they had their spot...

...The National Football League even wanted to print the picture on tickets for its January Super Bowl...

...In an era dominated by visual culture, the pictures—made even more powerful by their unscripted quality—produced a level of sadness and anger that the antiwar movement had no way to counter when it called for restraint in the war on terror and opposed the invasion of Iraq...

...The reaction to “Tumbling Woman” was exactly the opposite of what Rockefeller Center officials expected...

...Shock and Empathy Richard Drew had a history of taking grim photographs that headlined the news...

...Government officials thought that it was time to update the pictures they were using of Air Force One...

...But the New York City medical examiner’s office refused to classify anyone who leaped from the World Trade Center on September 11 as a jumper...

...But as the days dragged on and it became clear that those not found were in all likelihood dead, the tone of the messages on the missing fliers changed...

...Confined to a single sheet of paper, the posters typically featured the picture of a loved one, a brief description, and a contact number with a plea for anyone who knew anything to call...

...In getting out a flier, speed counted most...

...Help...

...The attacks had begun the way the terrorists surely hoped—as the most photographed and observed breaking-news story in history...

...It was six-thirty when he arrived in New Jersey after wangling a ride on a police boat and seven before he got to his car...

...All that Times readers were shown was a map of the Pacific theater of war...

...The result was that in a short period, the country had a deeply personal sense of the impact of 9/11, and before the fall of 2001 ended, the work of professional photographers like Richard Drew and Thomas Franklin had become inseparable in the public mind from family photos of the 9/11 dead...

...In contrast to the falling man photo, which made Americans feel their vulnerability, Franklin’s flag photo helped them feel pride...

...On the Friday following September 11, rain fell in New York, and many of the original posters were destroyed, but as the rains came, store owners and volunteers, realizing the importance of the posters, rushed to cover them with plastic...

...The Record’s photo deadline was nine, and rather than chance getting stuck in traffic that was getting worse by the minute, Franklin pulled into the Secaucus Radisson at eight o’clock and began transmitting his shots over the laptop computer he set up in the Radisson’s lobby bar...

...Americans were shocked by Drew’s Kennedy pictures, but they never saw themselves as powerful enough to run for president, let alone become an assassin’s target...

...Using a stationary camera on New York’s Upper West Side, CNN broadcast pictures of the damaged North Tower while its anchor Carol Lin told viewers, “This just in...

...She was a churchgoer all her life...

...Although not yet aware that a terrorist attack was taking place, Oliver frantically called for the studio to put him back on air, and with smoke pouring out of the North Tower behind him, he broke the 9/11 story to New York...

...A ‘jumper’ is somebody who goes to the office in the morning knowing they will commit suicide...

...By contrast, most Americans could imagine themselves caught in a random terrorist attack and put in the position of falling man...

...Franklin had no choice except to start over if he wanted to get his pictures in the Record, but rather than trying to find another place near the Jersey City shore from which to photograph, he took the ferry into Manhattan and made his way to Ground Zero...

...The pictures revealed the damage caused to the American fleet, but missing from the newsreel were scenes of the human carnage...

...But it was individual news photographers, moving from place to place without bulky equipment and multiple assistants, who were best positioned to capture the personal stories of 9/11 with still pictures that took on added meaning as readers lingered over them...

...Have you seen . . . ?” they asked...

...These people were forced out by the smoke and flames or blown out,” Ellen Borakove, speaking for the medical examiner’s office declared...

...They wanted to photograph the president’s plane with the Statue of Liberty in the background...

...As a twenty-one-year-old rookie photographer on what was supposed to be a routine assignment, he was standing next to Robert Kennedy in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan in 1968...

...In the days immediately following December 7, America’s editorial-page cartoonists were relentlessly savage in stoking the nation’s anger against Japan...

...Early on, the television networks recognized that in covering 9/11 they had unavoidably duplicated one another, and they sought to overcome this problem by sending their crews to do on-the-spot coverage...

...A host of lesserknown photojournalists turned out enough good work to make it seem, as David Friend wrote in his book Watching the World Change, an “elite regiment of Matthew Bradys” in New York on 9/11...

...The front page of the September 12 New York Times featured a three-column-wide picture of the burning World Trade Center and an accompanying story by veteran Times reporter R.W...

...They never cancelled the impact of Franklin’s picture...

...McWilliams was walking past the North Cove marina near the World Trade Center when he saw a flag flying from the stern of a yacht and helped himself to it, telling a police officer on duty nearby, “I’m going to take that flag...

...We don’t see his jacket flapping in the wind or his arms spread apart...

...With so much rubble at the World Trade Center, it was easy to imagine that a loved one would suddenly be found by rescue workers or discovered in a hospital without proper identification...

...The pictures that the major television networks broadcast to the country throughout Tuesday caught the horror of the attacks as they happened and were remarkably uniform in the images they showed...

...Posters that had initially been designed to help find a loved one were transformed into personal tributes, and more often than not, the pictures on these posters were family pictures taken at a graduation or a wedding or a picnic...

...The television race was now on to see which network could provide the best pictures of the burning North Tower...

...This essay is from his book in progress, Run-Up: 9/11 and the Road to Iraq...

...The key to the newspapers’ pictorial coverage of 9/11 was the ability of their photographers to capture scenes of individual suffering and heroism that allowed the big picture to become an intimate one...

...Iwo Jima II At the opposite visual extreme from Drew’s picture was Thomas Franklin’s photograph of three 9/11 firefighters, covered in dust, raising an American flag they had found over the ruins of the World Trade Center...

...Actual pictures of the attack did not arrive in the United States until December 14, when they were brought back on the plane that returned Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox from Oahu to Washington, and these pictures were not seen by readers of the Times and other papers until December 16, twenty-four hours after Knox reported to the nation on the state of American naval forces in the Pacific...

...He was swarthy, evil and ominous...

...The harm done by the terrorists at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was seen over and over thanks to instant replay and carefully spliced video clips...

...Nobody benefited more from the feelings these pictures roused than the Bush administration...

...In their refusal to give in to the destruction all around them, the three firefighters epitomized the courage of the many rescue workers who put their lives on the line on September 11...

...Even more important, the actions of the three sent the message that defiance rather than grief was going to be the ultimate American response to 9/11...

...But what distinguished the pictorial coverage by the Times and papers around the country was not their ability to print photos that duplicated the wide-angle, panoramic shots that television had provided on the morning of September 11...

...Please Call...

...The following week city workers were harassed by passersby when they began taking down the crumbling posters in Union Square Park, and at St...

...But the two controversies—which resulted in plans for the statue being shelved, and the charities using the picture to raise money for 9/11 victims being extensively audited—turned out to be sideshows...

...Life, America’s leading photo magazine in the 1940s, did not show pictures of the Pearl Harbor destruction until its December 29 issue, and it was not until November 1942 that FoxMovietone newsreel presented its first public showing of uncut footage of the attack...

...Apple, Jr., that described Lower Manhattan as “evocative of the nightmare world of Hieronymus Bosch with smoke and debris blotting out the sun...

...He had to get back to Hackensack...

...Two extensive searches to find out who he was, one by Peter Cheney of the Toronto Globe and Mail and the other by Tom Junod of Esquire, ended inconclusively and kept alive the feelings that the falling man could be any of the unidentified World Trade Center missing...

...The flyover was deliberate...

...Johnson, a friend from McWilliams’s ladder company, and Eisengrein, who had grown up with McWilliams on Staten Island, then joined him in looking for a place to put the flag...

...Like the second round of fliers, the Times portraits showed the victims of 9/11 as their families wanted to remember them...

...Franklin’s photograph was not easy for him to obtain...

...Over the next minute and forty-five seconds, he was able to shoot the twenty-four frames that would, with frame number fourteen, give him the picture of a lifetime...

...The New York Times reacted to the missingpersons fliers by assigning a half-dozen reporters to call the phone numbers on them and, if they got permission, to write profiles on those who appeared on the fliers...

...Protests by newspaper readers who believed that Drew’s picture exploited a man’s death in order to grab attention were so pervasive and bitter that most editors, save those doing year-end stories, chose to keep it out of circulation after its initial publication...

...That is the World Trade Center, and we have unconfirmed reports this morning that a plane has crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center...

...Vincent’s Hospital volunteers reposted the fliers that had been left there throughout the surrounding West Village neighborhood...

...postage stamp used to raise more than $10 million for charity...

...The picture that it most reminded Americans of was Joe Rosenthal’s classic photo of the marines on Iwo Jima raising the American flag atop Mount Suribachi at the start of one of the bloodiest battles of World War II...

...During the spring of 2003, troops fighting in Iraq spoke openly of being influenced by the images of 9/11 they carried with them (Franklin’s flag photo was even duplicated as a tattoo), and what was true for the troops was true for the nation...

...The three men were white, and when commissioning a statue based on Franklin’s picture was proposed, the plan immediately ran into trouble after the developer paying for the statue insisted that the firefighters it depicted should be a white, a black, and a Hispanic...

...The three firefighters in it were Dan McWilliams, George Johnson, and Bill Eisengrein, all from Brooklyn, and the story behind their flag-raising was straightforward...

...By nightfall on September 11, pictures of the missing had begun appearing on storefronts, mailboxes, and lampposts throughout Lower Manhattan...

...But under both titles the portraits sought to provide an informal snapshot, rather than a full-scale biography, of the person who had been killed in the attack on the World Trade Center...

...Pearl Harbor The contrast with Pearl Harbor, the event with which 9/11 is most often compared, could not have been more striking...

...By his own account Drew shot multiple frames of the falling man, and in the one he published, the man is at his most dignified...

...By this time both towers were on fire, and Drew began taking the pictures from which his falling man photo would emerge...

...Drew quickly packed his equipment and took a subway to the Chambers Street station in Lower Manhattan...

...But the officials forgot that for millions of Americans—particularly New Yorkers—such pictures and images are inseparable from those of 9/11...

...But Franklin’s day was not over...

...By the end of the week, papers from Chicago to Seattle had run Franklin’s picture, and there were requests to license and market the photo as well...

...But being tech-savvy did not in the long run make a significant difference when it came to posting a missing-persons flier...

...People wanted to see Franklin’s photo again and again...

...Correspondent Dick Oliver had just completed an on-air segment about the unfolding primary elections from a polling center in Lower Manhattan for the local Good Day New York show when American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m...

...The vulnerability embodied in the 2001 image of falling man was more than enough...

...The very first poster, according to the New York Times Magazine, was produced by the daughter of Mark Rasweiler in the art department of the ad agency that she worked for...

...With a little over twenty minutes to go before the deadline, his flag-raising photo arrived at the Record’s picture department digital control center...

...Mourning Posters Between the poles represented by Drew’s and Franklin’s iconic pictures, there was no shortage of brilliant photographs...

...On the morning of September 11, Drew was also on a routine assignment...

...President George W. Bush had little trouble selling the country on the need to invade Afghanistan in October 2001, and in 2003 he continued to be helped by Americans’ visual recall of 9/11 when he argued for invading Iraq...

...Anybody with access to an office Xerox machine or a neighborhood Kinko’s could turn out a flier that did the job...

...The profiles, which began appearing on Saturday, September 15, were initially labeled “Among the Missing,” and then relabeled “Portraits in Grief” In the paper’s September 17 edition...

...In addition, the photo appeared 255 million times on a U.S...

...In contrast to Drew’s falling man photo, Franklin’s flag photo presented no problems with identification...

...The new cartoon Jap was still a little yellow man but he was no longer amiable, no longer funny,” Life observed the week before it published its first photos of Pearl Harbor...

...The bravery that got the country through World War II, Franklin’s photo implicitly declared, was alive and well...

...The distinction was a technical one, but it made official the idea that jumping from the burning World Trade Center was neither volitional nor the result of weakness in character...

...Nobody was ready to say the mourning process was over...

...The pictures Drew took that day became the photographs of record of the dying senator...

...Before Tuesday was over, an estimated eighty million Americans households had watched 9/11 coverage, according to Nielsen Media Research...

...Nicolaus Mills, a professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College, is author of Winning the Peace: The Marshall Plan and America’s Coming of Age as a Superpower...

...His hands are at his sides...

...The messages on the second round of fliers were affectionate descriptions of the missing loved one...

...ARTICLES Images of Terror Enduring the Scars of 9/11 NICOLAUS MILLS On April 27 of this year, Air Force One rattled windows and shocked New Yorkers when it did a low flyover above New York Harbor...

...As novelist Ken Kesey, writing in Rolling Stone, observed, “Everything was so clear that day, so unencumbered by theories and opinions, by thought even...

...Fierce legal battles arose over how it was used to raise money for the victims of 9/11...

...Viewers could see the signature event of September 11, the second plane—United Airlines Flight 175—crashing into the South Tower of the World Trade Center at 9:03 a.m., on any network and hear the television anchors, focused at the time on the smoking North Tower, gasp as they realized that a planned attack on America was under way...

...She had two children...

...In the days immediately following September 11, hope ran high that the posters would produce results...

...It was a horrific sight that was repeated in the moments after the planes struck the towers...

...New York stations quickly turned to the citycams and weathercams they had in fixed positions at buildings, bridges, and airports...

...This Just In The first televised footage of the 9/11 attacks came from WNYW-TV, the Fox 5 station in New York...

...His editors at the Record, as well as the company president, Jon Markey, knew immediately that they had a historic shot on their hands, and to make sure that the Record was the only New York area paper that ran the photo on September 12, they did not put it on the Associated Press wire until ten minutes after midnight, when the deadlines for the other New York papers had passed...

...On December 7, 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt learned that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor at 1:40 in the afternoon, approximately forty-five minutes after the attack began, but it was not until 2:25 in the East that Americans got the news of the attack on their radios...

...He was shooting a maternity fashion show at Bryant Park on Forty-Second Street when his editor at the Associated Press rang him on his cell phone to tell him that a plane had just crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center...

...In this regard two pictures—Richard Drew’s photograph of a man trapped in the burning North Tower of the World Trade Center leaping to his death and Thomas Franklin’s photograph of three firefighters hoisting the American flag over the ruins of the World Trade Center—came to epitomize the events of September 11 and the political direction in which 9/11 culture would take the country...

...In an exhibit at Amherst College, Drew titled his photo “A Person Falls Headfirst From the North Tower of the New York World Trade Center, Sept...

...The irony is that by comparison with his Kennedy pictures, Drew’s falling man photograph was neither graphic nor blood filled, and it was not marketed as such...

...He learned that a plane had struck the World Trade Center at nine in the morning when an editor at his paper, the Bergen Record, based in Hackensack, New Jersey, rushed into the photo department with the news...

...The messages on the first fliers were practical ones...

...But in contrast to the Kennedy pictures, which nobody refused to print, the falling man shot ran once in most American newspapers and then disappeared for a long time...

...He is looking forward, not downward, and his left leg is bent at the knee, as if he were running or riding a bicycle...

...He seems in control, even though he is flying through the air upside down...

...He was a devoted son...

...The following day, when Roosevelt addressed the nation and described December 7 as “a date which will live in infamy,” the New York Times carried a front-page story about the attack, but there were no pictures of the destroyed American ships...

...In an age of political correctness, the identity of the three firefighters in Franklin’s photo also created a problem...

...The worldwide figures were even greater...

...Knowing more about falling man or his female equivalent was still intrusive as far as most Americans were concerned...

...Then the television station helicopters and their camera crews became airborne...

...His early efforts to photograph 9/11 came to naught, when a police officer who wanted all bystanders to leave the area shoved him against a lamppost, causing his camera to jam and erase all the pictures in it...

...As New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani later remarked of the photo, “It showed even on that first day, the spirit of America was not only alive, but the spirit of America was soaring over the evil deeds that were done to us...

...It was just after five o’clock when Franklin, who had been standing near a first-aid station at the corner of Liberty and West Streets, saw the firemen trying to raise a flag on a pole jutting up from the wreckage of the Marriott Hotel...

...In 2001, there was no need to caricature the 9/11 terrorists...

...It did not matter that the most widely seen pictures of 9/11 were neither philosophical nor political arguments about how America should respond to the attacks on it...

...What New Yorkers in Lower Manhattan saw on April 27 was not Air Force One, but a Boeing 747 flying like the planes that had struck the World Trade Center eight years earlier...