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
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Chris Morgan