Jennifer S. Altman: “We took the pictures and they are the proof of the day”

JSA: I was on my way to a different assignment, a political one. It was primary day. I live in the city, and I was driving down the FDR to Brooklyn. I'd gotten to about the Brooklyn Bridge when I saw the towers go up in flames. It must have just happened. I pulled my car over on the side of the highway, which you should not do, I don't recommend it, and shot some pictures from there. A cop flagged me down and told me to move along. Somehow, I managed to get in touch with my editor and said, something just happened at the World Trade Center, I'm going down there. I parked in the first spot I could find, under the Brooklyn Bridge, probably not a legal one, and started running toward the towers.

There were thousands of people running past me, and I was really the only one going the other way. At some point the second plane flew over my head. I remember that it was very loud.

JSA: I maneuvered to where I thought people would be trying to get help, down by Fulton and Church, where the Oculus is now, across from St. Paul's Chapel. I was definitely one of the first there. More journalists came down after, so I was able to get a lot before people arrived. The first pictures in the series are evidence of that: Rose, and then Elaine, the woman who was burned. They both worked in the first tower and had just come down.

I recently looked at the official timeline of the day, because I wondered what my exact timing was. I'd always known roughly, but not the numbers. I'd shot the towers from the highway, and my sense of timing was right on. It had just happened.

JSA: I still had film in one camera and had just gotten a digital for the other, so I was shooting both, depending on which lens I had on. Most of it was on film. The digital card was tiny, megabytes, we didn't have gigabyte cards then, and I used it until it ran out. I'm glad I shot on film. It's a different texture. Early digital wasn't as saturated. It didn't have the body that images have now.

JSA: Elaine Duch. Almost eighty percent of her body was burned. People were helping her, she got into the EMS truck, and within a couple of minutes the tower was falling. For a long time I had visions of her, because I didn't know what happened to her.

About six months later I was covering a release from the burn center on the Upper East Side, and I kept looking at this woman's face and thinking, is this my woman? I went back to my negatives and compared them, and I called the editor I'd worked with on 9/11 and said, I think this could be her. He said, me too. At the press conference her twin sister was there. I have a twin sister. I thought that was meaningful. So I wrote her a handwritten letter, that I was the one who took her photo, what it meant to me, the twin sister angle, and I was the only person she agreed to for a follow-up interview and photos.

JSA: Somebody called the paper, a friend of hers, from Virginia I think, and I was able to track her down soon after. I've followed up with her several times since. We're still in touch. It was her birthday recently, and I'd like to photograph her again.

There are other people in my photos I found, or still wonder about. There's a police officer, Ramon Suarez, who in one picture is helping to save a woman named Crystal Tyson. I found her. Ramon went back into the towers after he helped her, this is all within minutes, and he died right after those photos. I got in touch with his family and reunited them with Crystal. His daughter Jillian is now a police officer. That picture is in the permanent exhibit at the police museum, and a bunch of the others are in the 9/11 Museum.

JSA: Photographers are sensitive, right? You have to be able to capture people's essence, to understand them, to know how to visually convey compassion. But the camera is also a filter. To put your camera up when you're feeling something makes you a better photographer, because you filter your feelings through it. It gives you that one step removed, so you can deal with your feelings later. You still have them. It helps guide you. Even a wedding photographer, covering the happiest moment of somebody's life, feels something and puts the camera up.

It was cathartic, not just meeting these people afterward but shooting that way. I had to hone in on my sensibilities, my intuition, and I did. Professionally, I felt like all of my skills had led me to that moment.

JSA: I was doing my job. I was looking for the moments that would resonate in documenting our history, because I knew this was a crucial moment. And I felt it was important to show not just the terror of the day but the compassion, people supporting other people. I was taking pictures of people in the most vulnerable state of their lives. To this day, that was probably their most vulnerable moment. The pictures that resonate with people have a vulnerability and a strength simultaneously, and that's what I was trying to show.

I was afraid, like everybody else. But I trusted my instincts. I knew how to move around, where I should be standing, what was safe. Nobody could have expected the towers to fall so quickly. But I felt safe within myself.

JSA: Just before, I'd been seeing people come down, pieces of the building falling off, hearing the thuds. I said to the friend next to me, those people on the top floors, how are they going to be saved? And soon after, it all came down.

It was the loudest sound I've ever heard, almost like the earth groaned, and the ground lifted up underneath us. I was next to a photographer friend and I said, "Run." She dove under a car and I got maybe a block and a half before the cloud hit me from behind and threw me down. It was very powerful. Fortunately it hit me from behind and not my front. Then everything went black.

JSA: An eerie silence. And what people don't tell you is that when it went black, all the oxygen was sucked out. You couldn't breathe. I pulled my little sweater over my face. I was one of those people covered in white. It was black for a while, not a minute. I found a fire hydrant and felt my way into an office building and climbed to the third floor. I washed my arms and face in the bathroom, because that residue was very itchy, and people walked around in it all day. Then I found a phone and called my editor and my family.

JSA: There was a woman on the floor praying with rosary beads, with workers around her, and another woman in front of her said, "Don't take her picture." So, I took one and stopped. I had to be sensitive to what we were doing, and I had the picture I needed. Everybody in that building was so scared, all covered in white. I looked back through the lobby pictures recently. Outside it was completely pitch dark, and people were just sitting around covered in white. All you heard was the crackling of the papers on fire. Unless you were there, you really don't understand the gravity of it.

JSA: I went back to the street, but not to where I'd been standing. Everything was on fire. The trees by the church were on fire. The air was so toxic I felt like the whole area was going to blow up from the gas. My editor wanted me back for deadline, otherwise I probably would have gone back, so I walked the other way, toward the hospital a few blocks away.

Cell phones didn't work. There was a cop on a payphone and a line of people waiting to make calls. And when I got to the hospital, there was no one there. Just the staff, waiting. I waited to see if anybody showed up, and nobody did. That's when I thought, all those people I'd just been photographing, the firefighters, the people helping down below, died. That was upsetting, obviously.

JSA: I was working for Newsday that day. It was my first day with them, my first assignment. My editor was Jeff Schamberry. He passed away a while ago. A real wonderful guy. He was the first person I called, before my family, because I'd told him I was going there and I wanted him to know I was alive. He called my family for me. I also called them after.

Then I had to drive out through thousands of people. Fortunately, I'd parked where I did. Friends of mine had their cars crushed. I knew the fastest way in was to run and not deal with the car, and that turned out to be the way out too.

JSA: New York was a completely different vibe afterward, for many years. For five years I covered the aftermath, and I tried to stay in touch with the people in my pictures and find more of them, because I understood the gravity of what they went through. I feel them deeply still. And if you know more about their stories, you're more in tune with the pictures.

It takes a toll, covering something like that. War photographers deal with it daily, I'm sure. For me it took a while to work through. But covering it thoroughly, doing the aftermath, meeting the people, it was cathartic, and it helped me heal. Not everyone has that.

JSA: Directly after, my sinuses and my lungs felt singed. I'm okay. I'm lucky so far. But there are a lot of people who are not okay from that day. Thousands and thousands of more people are affected, more than you would think.

It's interesting to me how clear my vision of the day is. I know exactly where I was standing when I took each picture. I can almost see myself taking it, which is weird to think about. It resides in a very deep part of you. You outrun your possible death; that's a meaningful day. And under that much pressure I was able to stay composed, to compose pictures, and to stay okay within myself.

JSA: At the end of the series there's a woman's high-heeled shoes on the street, right after the towers fell. I always thought she must have been so scared to just throw her shoes off and run.

And there's a series down at what's now the Oculus, a gate, three views of people touching it. That was essentially where the tower stood. Every year after, on the anniversary, I'd go down at a random time and just stand there. Then they took the gate away and built the Oculus, and it had a different feel. It's a shopping center now. But I still go down most years, not for the service. It's important to feel close to it, and also to remember that you have to keep on living.

JSA: A lot of the work is aftermath: firefighters on the floor after the towers came down, the Winter Garden with the windows blown out. Mine shows what was happening down below before that. Not the calm before the storm, because this terrible thing was already happening, but a different side of it: the fear, the community, the support, the love. People rallying around these people. You don't see that often. Most people don't have pictures literally at the foot of the towers before one had fallen, with Rose just a few feet below them. I think the beginning of the series is the most powerful part, because you understand how everything went down.

JSA: Life said it was one of the top 25 pictures of the day, and Newsweek chose it as their picture of the year. There are very few pictures that people think of as iconic, like the couple in Times Square, and now we're oversaturated. I love pictures, I could take a million. But your mind is saturated every day, through social media, through newspapers, through whatever you're looking at, and it's hard now to identify imagery that really encapsulates a circumstance.

JSA: People forget why this happened in the first place. No one talks about it. I think the day was so tragic that people adhere to the parts they want to know about. That's probably normal human behavior. You filter things out until you remember what you want to remember. As a nation, it was probably more important to heal than to hone in on why. But people sweep things under the rug all the time, because they don't want the real answer.

JSA: My younger daughter said to me the other day, "What will you do when people don't remember?" I said, they will, because they have the pictures. Our pictures are the proof of that day. So, people don't forget.

It's important that we photograph it, that people see not just the hard things but the humanity. It's so easy to see the bad things and take away the good parts. That's a hard balance, and I think my pictures do that. You see all the sides.

Life repeats itself. I teach, and there's always a parade, always a protest, and then it happens ten years later, and fifteen years later. The World Trade Center had the original bombing in '93. Who thought that would happen again? So, it's important to remember things on a historical level, so that perhaps you can change. I'm not sure we're easily able to. But if you have these pictures, and you understand how deeply it impacted the people in them, you can feel them. Other generations will learn from them.

JSA: That it still matters. It was a crucial moment in our history, but it also showed so much about humanity and coming together. The consequence shouldn't just be the act of terrorism. The consequence should be that people are kinder, more compassionate, more aware of what's going on in the world, more able to persevere under trying circumstances, in a positive way.

Life is in the details. You can photograph them. But noticing the details and responding to them is a different level of understanding, and hopefully that's conveyed. It's easy to say we'll learn from our mistakes; we've been saying it for thousands of years. You just hope people take the positive from it.

JSA: If you stop talking about things, eventually nobody will remember.