On a Clear Day: An Introduction by Brian Byrd

Twenty-five years is long enough for memory to begin its quiet erosion. The painful memories go first, not because they matter least, but because they hurt most. That forgetting is a kind of mercy, but it carries a danger: a catastrophe remembered without context hardens into ritual, its meaning fading even as its impact endures. As photographers, our instinct is to run toward danger and document it, so that no one can deny it happened and those who were not there can see it for themselves. What follows are the recollections of the photographers who captured September 11, 2001, and the hours that came after. Every act of witness begins with a particular pair of eyes on a particular morning. And so this issue, like so many accounts of catastrophe, begins with the weather.

"The day was clear when we dropped that bomb," Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay, recalled of the morning of August 6, 1945, when they flew over Hiroshima. "It was a clear, sunshiny day and the visibility was unrestricted."

Catastrophe, it turns out, favors good weather.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, the sky over New York was the kind of blue that photographers wait whole seasons for -- cloudless, crystalline, unrestricted visibility in every direction. It was primary day. I voted early, then went to the office ahead of schedule for a call with a grantee in Kenya. I was on the 23rd floor of the Rockefeller Foundation when a colleague interrupted the call to say a plane had hit one of the Twin Towers.

From the conference room we had an unobstructed view. We stood at the glass debating the ordinary explanations -- a heart attack in the cockpit, an instrument failure -- when the second plane hit. The first word out of my mouth was "terrorists." Nobody argued.

What I remember most about the hours that followed is not the towers falling, though I watched them fall. It is the telephones. The foundation's senior leadership and board were in Italy, in transit home, and I would learn that day that in an emergency, every call to the institution routes to the communications office -- my office. So while the building emptied, my assistant and I stayed to answer phones that would not stop ringing. Family members of board and executive staff, calling from all over the world, asking the same question in different voices: Was it their plane? We knew the flights were domestic. We knew almost nothing else. The phones rang until four in the afternoon. Then they stopped, and my assistant walked to the Hudson to catch one of the last ferries to New Jersey, and I walked home to the East Village through smoke so thick it hung like London fog, carrying a smell I will not describe except to say that everyone who was there knows it. That night I sealed my windows with duct tape. Outside my building, an armed National Guardsman stood by a parked tank in the middle of the street.

A week later I was cooking meals for rescue workers at St. Paul’s Chapel, near Ground Zero. As I was flipping burgers, wearing a paper mask, a passing FEMA worker took one look at me and handed me a gas mask. "You don't know what kind of shit is in the air," he said. When my shift ended, I passed the mask to my replacement, the way you pass a torch, or a warning.

And two weeks before any of this, I had been at Windows on the World, high in the North Tower, watching a friend's band play. I remember pressing my face against the glass, looking down at the city, and asking myself an idle question: if there were a fire up here -- something out of The Towering Inferno -- how would we ever get out?

I have carried these details for twenty-five years. This is the first time I have set them down in public without breaking apart. I tell you this not because my day was extraordinary -- it was not; millions of New Yorkers have their own version, and nearly three thousand families have one with no ending -- but because it explains why we made this issue, and why we made it the way we did.

Hot Mirror is a magazine about photography, and September 11 was, among all its other terrible dimensions, the most photographed catastrophe in human history to that point. It unfolded on live television, yes, but it endures in still images: the impossible orange bloom against the blue; the ash-gray figures walking north like statues learning to move; the missing posters that papered the city into a gallery of the not-yet-mourned; the man falling headfirst, upside down, in a photograph so unbearable that many newspapers ran it once and never again. These images did not merely document the day. They became the day. For the majority of people now alive -- anyone under thirty-five, which is to say most of the world -- the photographs are not a record of memory. They are the memory itself.

This is the strange and heavy work that photographs of atrocity perform, and it is older than 9/11. Return to Tibbets, circling back over Hiroshima to look at what he had done, watching a black, boiling cloud rise to his own altitude where a city had been minutes before. His account ends with a sentence that has haunted me since I first read it: "We took pictures as rapidly as we could." Even there, the human response to the unthinkable was to reach for a camera. Not to explain it. Not yet to grieve it. Simply to hold it, because the eye alone could not.

The photographers in this issue understood that instinct as a vocation. In the pages that follow, the men and women who ran toward the towers while others ran away revisit their contact sheets and their consciences, twenty-five years on. They talk about what they saw and what they chose to frame; what they published and what they have never shown anyone; what it cost them to look, and what it would have cost the rest of us if they hadn't. Their individual perspectives differ -- on proximity, on dignity, on whether any image can be adequate to three thousand murders -- but they share a conviction that runs through the whole history of witness photography, from the rubble of Hiroshima to the segregated South that Gordon Parks refused to let America look away from: that seeing is a moral act, and that the photograph is how one generation transfers the weight of what it saw onto the shoulders of the next.

That transfer is now underway. The children born on September 11, 2001, turn twenty-five this year. They will inherit these images the way my generation inherited the mushroom cloud -- as history, as warning, as a test of whether a picture can still make us feel what the day felt like.

On a clear day, the old song promises, you can see forever. These photographs are our clear day. Look at them slowly. They can see forever in both directions.