 Catherine
Leuthold, Matrix
There are many unreal moments. At 9:50 am I stand in disbelief as
the south tower collapses in front of my lens. It sounds like a
jet taking off. I move slowly away towards the street when a huge
grey cloud filled with debris slams into me and I almost fall. Watching
it through my camera, I steal four frames, that I see later are
a gray cloud with parts of a police car, a man running in front
of it, and a blue police barricade. And then just nothing but suffocating
blackness, muffled screams, moans, an "Oh my God", and
my quiet terror.
I felt like I was being buried alive. I couldn't breath or see.
I think, ahhh shit, this is it. But it isn't. I reach out and find
a corner of marble of a wall in front of me and pull myself around
it. I pull my shirt over my mouth and keep my eyes closed. I start
talking, saying my name and that I'm a photographer over and over
to keep the fear back. I ask if anyone is near me. Then arms and
a voice find me and we talk quickly. I ask him who he is, what does
he do, anything. I will always remember his voice, but I can't remember
his name. That bothers me. There is no sense of time in this place,
we hear a shout "Over here...a door." We struggle to find
it in the blackness, and then there is a yellow light.
I see a ghostly face, a man wearing a Yarmulke, he pulls us into
a computer shop. A woman screams her partner is still out there.
The man has locked the door and I yell at him to open it. No one
should be out there. There is no anwser outside, and I start taking
pictures again. |
 Don
MacLeod:
When I heard the news, I grabbed my cameras and ran up three flights
of stairs to the roof of my building in Little Italy. My neighbors
were already there, silently watching the collapse of the South
Tower. There wasn't much to say; we all stood there watching, not
talking. Normally we go the roof for Fourth of July fireworks or
to sunbathe or to have a summertime party. Watching the towers fall
on an otherwise perfect September morning was so incomprehensible
that nobody at the time seemed to realize the enormity of it. The
attack seemed to happen in slow motion. For those us far enough
removed geographically from the site, what we were watching was
surreal. It wasn't frightening or moving. The attack looked like
an almost prim performance of catastrophe. The terrorists wanted
to make an immense show; they certainly had an audience for their
murderous handiwork.
While the rest of New York slowly returned to routine, work continued
around the clock at Ground Zero. Rescuers worked through the clouds
of smoke from still-burning fires and the thick dust raised by every
move they made. The site was lit by portable floodlights brought
to the scene the night of the attack. This shot was taken at 11:00
PM, Sept. 16, five days after the attack. At the time, there was
still hope of rescuing survivors and the list of the missing was
still estimated to be below 5,000. |
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Jay Mallin:
I was at the Pentagon early on, and the photos taken an hour or
so later, when the media had been pushed much further back, don't
convey the destruction of the attack. The Pentagon itself is so
huge, the gap blown in it looks small by comparison. What was
really stunning, standing there, was that there was no sign of
the plane itself. This was a big plane with a lot of local people
in it, people from my neighborhood, and it hit that building so
hard it seems to have vanished into nothing.
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Ryan
Mercer, Chief Photographer, Herald News, Passaic County, NJ
I got caught in a blast of dust 2-3 blocks from Ground Zero. It
swallowed you up, everything went deathly quiet and completely
black. For sixty seconds I had no idea how I was going to get
out. Then I took a lens cleaning cloth covered with a polymer
to breathe through. I found another man in a similar situation,
we walked out together and I brought him to an ambulance. After
I calmed down, I went back in to get my job done.
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