Nineteen Frames: Lori Grinker

LG: I was living in a kind of in-between state. I had recently moved into an apartment in Williamsburg, near the Lorimer Street stop, but I was barely unpacked because I was waiting to learn whether I had been accepted into a New York City housing program. My husband at the time was in Spain, and much of my film was still stored in the back of my cousin’s refrigerator in Montclair, New Jersey. I had only a small amount with me.

That morning, I was preparing to leave for an oncology follow-up appointment. I had been treated for cancer, and I believe it was my six-month checkup. As I came downstairs, the woman who owned the house called me into her apartment. She had several televisions on. On the screens, we could see that a plane had struck one of the towers. At first, people were saying it might have been a small plane.

I still thought I had to get to my appointment. I walked around the corner, where I could see over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and saw smoke coming from the tower. I tried to get on the subway, but it was not running. When I returned to the apartment, Jeffrey Smith, my agent at Contact Press Images, had called. He told me I was on assignment for People magazine: find a bridge, cross into Manhattan, and document what was happening.

LG: I did not even know how to get to the Williamsburg Bridge. I grabbed my cameras, my press pass, some Kodachrome, and a little color-negative film, and found my way there. As I crossed, teenagers were leaning over the side crying. I raised my camera, but they said no, so I respected that.

Then the tower came down. From where I stood, the outline of the building seemed to remain for a moment, surrounded by smoke. It looked unreal, almost like an image created in Photoshop. People were running toward Brooklyn, and the police were ordering everyone off the bridge. I showed my press pass and said I needed to go the other way. The officer let me continue into Manhattan.

LG: Surreal—almost like a movie set. Everything was coated in white dust. I began photographing papers and debris. Police officers would say, “Take your picture and leave.”

I had been assigned to meet a writer, but I kept telling the magazine that I could not spend the day searching for someone so we could make a few portraits and interviews. History was unfolding in front of me. I needed to photograph it.

Because I had so little film, I asked other photographers for rolls along the way. Some gave me one roll here, another there. My friend and colleague Jacques Menache was also trying to reach me with film. Those small acts of generosity made the work possible.

LG: Someone told me I would have to go all the way around Battery Park and then come back up the West Side. Along the way, I photographed people looking upward, papers in the street, abandoned shoes, and the city covered in dust. I did not see anyone jumping, and I did not see blood. I am grateful for that. What I encountered was devastating, but quieter than some of the horrors witnessed by other photographers.

Eventually, I reached the Ground Zero area. Near the marina, firefighters or emergency workers carried a covered body past us on a stretcher. Another photographer and I both made photographs. Later, I entered the damaged building and ran into James Nachtwey and several other photographers who were looking for film.

LG: I wish I could find him. He had already given me film earlier, and when I asked again he said, “This is the last roll I’m going to give you.” We were standing near the boats when the covered body was carried out. I told him it was visually interesting inside the building, trying to be helpful. He said he would remain outside in case more bodies were brought out.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw several men coming off a boat with a flag, but at first it did not register. I went back inside. Then I realized they were firefighters carrying the flag, so I hurried toward a broken window that overlooked the scene.

LG: The firefighters were exhausted. Some covered their faces and asked us not to photograph them; others asked to use my phone to call their families. Volunteers walked around carrying trays of sandwiches. I had eaten only a banana that morning, but I remember thinking about all the dust falling on everything.

Some people were angry with photographers: “Why are you taking pictures? Why aren’t you helping?” That question is always present in situations like this. At the same time, the firefighters were looking out for us. When I photographed a streetlight hanging precariously, they warned me not to stand too close because it could fall. Even in the middle of the destruction, they were trying to protect other people.

LG: By the time I reached the window, they were below me, taking down a tattered green flag and preparing to raise the American flag they had brought from the boat. I was alone at first. I had nineteen frames left.

I felt the adrenaline immediately. I knew something important was happening, and I knew I had to capture it. I was also trying to tell Jacques where I was. Then another photographer, Ricky Flores, came into the space. He was shooting digitally and was practically standing on my shoulders, pushing forward. We argued because I believed we had to share the limited space. He later apologized, and we made peace.

LG: It was largely about the wind. The firefighters unfolded the flag and began attaching it. I did not have a motor drive, so I was not shooting continuously. I composed, watched, and waited. As they raised the flag, there was almost no wind. I held back. Then a small gust came, and I made a frame. They lifted it higher; another gust came, and I photographed again. Finally, the wind opened the flag in the way I had been waiting for.

I made both horizontal and vertical frames—probably because that is how I had been trained to think. I paced myself carefully because every exposure mattered. There was one moment I missed: one firefighter turned and removed his cap. By then, I had run out of film. Ricky, shooting digital, made one frame more than I did.

LG: I knew it was powerful. I was not thinking, “This will become a historic image.” But that photograph stayed at the front of my mind for the rest of the day. I knew there was something there.

Tom Franklin, who later became a friend, photographed the scene with a longer lens from another angle, so his image is more compressed. Mine includes more of the surrounding wreckage. The men are small within the destruction. For me, that scale matters: the flag is not separated from what happened around it.

LG: Jacques eventually reached me. Then firefighters entered and ordered us out. You can tell yourself that you are going to stay and do your work, but when the firefighters themselves are leaving, you understand that you must leave too. We ran out.

LG: I had to reach the Time Inc. lab before deadline. Jacques and I walked uptown. Along the way, people stood watching Building 7 collapse while police pushed everyone farther away. Eventually, I reached a subway that was running near West Fourth Street.

I was covered in dust. My black suede sandals had turned white. People on the train stared at me, and I felt as though I had come out of Beirut after a bombing. Then I emerged at Rockefeller Center, and everything was clean and clear. It was another world. A short subway ride had taken me from what felt like a war zone into a beautiful, untouched part of New York.

LG: They asked whether I wanted to take a shower. I just wiped myself down with paper towels. They gave me something to eat, and I handed over the film. As the lab made small prints, I kept telling the editors, “There is a picture with the flag. I know it is there.”

They eventually found it and ran it as the final image in the issue, full-page. At that stage, I was not evaluating the entire day as a coherent body of work. I was exhausted and probably in shock. But the flag image had remained in my mind from the moment I made it.

LG: I have always been drawn to details that can carry a larger story: a shoe, a singed document, the information printed on a piece of paper, a streetlight hanging over the wreckage. I had worked in war zones before—in Cambodia, for example, where I photographed landmine victims and heard bombs—but I was not primarily a hard-news photographer. My work often dealt with the aftermath of war, famine, and displacement through longer-term projects.

On September 11, I arrived after the central acts had occurred. I did not photograph planes or bodies falling. What I could photograph were the traces: the things left behind, the people trying to work, and the transformed landscape. That may be why the pictures feel quiet. It is also simply the way I see.

LG: The volunteers distributing food stand out. Suddenly, people were there helping in whatever way they could. I did not photograph them—perhaps because I did not feel comfortable, perhaps because they did not want to be photographed, or perhaps because I was focused elsewhere. Looking back, I think that quiet, immediate generosity was an important part of the day.

LG: Yes. The sequence begins with smoke seen from Brooklyn and the collapse viewed through the structure of the Williamsburg Bridge. Then there are the papers, shoes, and debris; firefighters sitting in exhaustion; the covered body being carried out; the broken glass; and finally the flag being raised.

It is not the complete story of September 11—no photographer could make that—but it is the story of the day I experienced. There are no planes and no visible blood. I am grateful for that. Yet the horror is present in what remains.

LG: I initially imagined returning every year, although I did not continue in that way. The first return was an attempt to retrace my steps and understand how the city was changing. I found some of the people I had photographed, including an Afghan fruit seller whose business card I had kept, and I revisited storefronts and interiors connected to that day.

At the World Trade Center, opaque glass had been installed so people inside could enjoy the light without seeing the continuing repairs. I do not want to say the event had been erased, but it felt unsettling to see how quickly parts of the city had become beautiful again—as though nothing had happened. The “now” photographs came from that tension between recovery and disappearance.

LG: On September 11, I was using 35mm Canon cameras. For the later photographs, I used a Mamiya 7 and medium-format film. I wanted the return to feel more deliberate. The first pictures were made under pressure, with scarce film and events moving quickly. The later work allowed for slower looking and a different kind of reflection.

LG: It is difficult to believe that twenty-five years have passed. I think about how much has happened in my life and in the world during that time, and how quickly lived experience becomes history.

I would want younger viewers to understand that the day was made up not only of the images repeated on television—the planes, the towers, the collapse—but also of small human actions. People were frightened, exhausted, grieving, helping strangers, making phone calls to their families, giving rolls of film to other photographers, and carrying food through the dust. History is experienced through those details.

I also hope the photographs encourage questions about consequences: how a single day changed public fear, foreign policy, war, surveillance, prejudice, and the way people understood safety. The images should not close the story with a familiar symbol. They should help keep the questions open.

LG: At first, the answer is simple: I was told I was on assignment, so I went. But once I was there, the assignment as originally described no longer made sense. I was not going to search for a writer and make a routine portrait while all of this was unfolding in front of me.

The instinct was: I am here, this is happening, and I have to photograph it. I had spent years covering the aftermath of war and suffering, but usually through longer, more considered projects. September 11 was different because it was sudden and immediate. The basic principle, though, was the same: be present, pay attention, and make a record.

LG: That patience is part of urgency. You can be surrounded by chaos and still have to wait. You have to observe the movement of people, the light, the wind, and the shape of the frame. With film, there was no endless sequence and no immediate confirmation on the back of the camera. Each exposure was a decision.

The photograph exists because I arrived, because another photographer shared his last roll, because I recognized what was happening, and because I waited for the flag to open. There was chance in all of that, but there was also attention. Photography often lives in the meeting place between the two.

LG: I had been trying to move away from war and suffering after spending so much time with those subjects. My family had been researching Grinkers around the world since the 1960s. Because the name is unusual, it was possible to trace relatives—or people we hoped were relatives—across Israel, Ukraine, Argentina, and elsewhere. My own family left Lithuania during the pogroms and eventually came to New York. Other branches disappeared during the Holocaust.

I began making medium-format landscapes and still lifes, asking what my life might have been if my family had taken a different route. In a sense, birthplace is a lottery. I imagined the lives I might have lived in those other places. But even this project, which I hoped would be lighter, led back to war, persecution, and displacement. I could not entirely escape those histories because they were embedded in the family story.

LG: Yes. Family history is often made of fragments: a name, an address, an old story, a photograph, a relative’s memory that may not be entirely clear. The same is true of public history. No single image explains everything, but an image can preserve a detail that might otherwise disappear.

That is why photographs matter to me. They are not the whole truth, and they should never pretend to be. But they can hold a trace. They can make us look again, ask what happened outside the frame, and remember that history was lived by individual people.