This page is a personal project following the events of September 11th. There follows (below) a summary of my state three days after the attack, and then some photos.
Quick Links : World Trade Center before | during and after September 11th 2001.
Friday September 14th 2001 I'm now getting flashbacks of the event on Tuesday even though I only saw most of it on the tv and in print. My Matrix screensaver starts up with green text starting to fall from the top of a black screen. This brings back an image of the towers going down. We ordered pizza and some bottles of seltzer on Thursday night. When I stood the brown paper bag containing the plastic bottles on the pizza box, they tipped sideways and fell. Again, I started to see the towers going down. This morning I ripped open my packet of oatmeal for breakfast. A cloud of dust erupted. Again I saw the crumbling towers. I think I just watched the tv too much, or perhaps it was their constant repeating of the same few images : the first plane hitting, the second plan hitting, and of course the towers going down, endlessly. Down and down forever. They were never really up and never really down in tv-land, just always on the point of collapse. I notice that they don't seem to have the nerve to show the jumpers any more. Nor did they feel like showing the bloody, peeling survivors, nor the body parts littering the area. No, just the towers, presumably that's shocking enough to keep viewers glues to the set without actively repulsing them. I saw the burning towers from my living room window. We could see mostly just smoke, but also there appeared to be "particles" in the cloud which turned out to be the paper blown out into the atmosphere by the impact. I have no problems dealing with this bit. It's in context, right after that odd-sounding thunderclap we heard which I thought was very metallic sounding, and right before we stumbled off to the subway already in mild shock going to work by habit even though we had seen and heard what was happening and I had worked out it could only be a terrorist attack. The towers going down though is haunting my thoughts. That's the only part of the experience I've gone through 100s of times, repeatedly, from a dozen angles. I need to not see it for a while. With this constant recollection of the horror, come many older memories of all the photographs I've taken of the twin towers in my 4 years in NYC. I have photos from my living room, from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, from the back of a taxi on the Ari Halbertsam sliproad, and many, many shots from the Brooklyn Bridge itself. Then there are shots from as far away as the Staten Island Ferry and even dozens of miles into New Jersey : from there they were even more dominant than on the island; most of the competing buildings not even poking over the horizon at this distance. I have shots from the circle line, and finally a whole bunch from the top of both towers, some with my family, some from Windows on the World at a seminar I attended there with Goldman Sachs. It's not like I was even that fond of them. I thought they were too big and ugly, but then again, they certainly were there, you couldn't ignore them. New York consisted of the three or four big guys surrounded by the ankle-biters. Now when you look at the financial district, it could be any anonymous city. It's not the same city. I don't even know how much I want to take new photographs any more. I can't decide what to do with them. Some of them I've never even shown to people. I had always meant to scan the good ones in and post them, but only about 1/3 are done. On the one hand, they are the past, the WTC is gone and will never be again. On the other hand, they represent something better to think about than most of the images we are now seeing everywhere. For that reason I have decided to start scanning and posting, and also collecting links to the images I have already posted. Only at the end will I post my pictures of the burning building (oh yes, I took a couple too). I think my reason is to prove to myself that the events of Tuesday 11th September 2001 are merely the death of something, not the previous 30 years of life. Don't click on the following link for death and destruction. Only click on it to remember how things were and perhaps a pointer to how good they will be in the future. Chris Morgan -- Chris MorganNext : my photos of the World Trade Center and surroundings, before the attack.