“This is What We Do” Matthew McDermott
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Matt was asleep in his Astoria apartment, not due to start work for the New York Post until ten o'clock, when his mother called and told him to turn on the TV. Within minutes he had borrowed a friend's motorcycle, loaded two cameras and as much film as he could carry, and was riding downtown behind an unmarked police cruiser. He spent the rest of the day on the pile, jumping from beam to beam until the soles of his boots melted, making some of the most enduring photographs of that day -- among them a firefighter kneeling in prayer with an axe carried off the Staten Island ferry, an image that now covers a nine-story mural in Manhattan, and a lone firefighter advancing into the rubble with nothing but a pike.
Twenty-five years later, Matt lives in Connecticut with his wife and two children, though he is still in the city almost every day. We spoke with him about that morning, the firefighters he photographed, the discipline of shooting film against a deadline, and the negatives he didn't revisit for a decade.
HM: Thank you for doing this. Even twenty-five years on, this is a difficult conversation for a lot of people -- just bringing it back up and having to remember everything that happened that day.
MM: My pleasure. I think it's important that we do this. There's a whole generation under thirty that doesn't even know what the hell 9/11.
HM: What did September 11 really mean? Someone made an enormous effort to do this -- what were they trying to achieve? And somehow that conversation isn't happening in this country, twenty-five years later.
MM: First off, I will say there was definitely an innocence lost for us. It was a major shift for everybody, emotionally and psychologically. You think back to the late 1990s -- it's always been dangerous, but the world just seemed a lot more innocent. This was the mile marker of a level of violence and a level of hatred that had been bubbling under the surface, and here it is, in our face, and it's very real.
For me, this was next level. We had the attack in '93, and their goal then was to bring down the buildings, but they didn't even come close. This was a whole next level of hatred, of real evil. This wasn't a military installation -- this was purely attacking America at its heart and soul. Realizing that level of hatred for us was out there was really the next level of fear, the real slap of reality.
But I can tell you the most amazing thing I remember through the days following: the amount of American flags out there. The amount of neighbors who met neighbors for the first time -- people who may have lived next to each other for ten, fifteen years and never knew each other. The one thing the world did see is that when America actually comes together as one, we can't be stopped. Which leads us to now, and how divisive we are. That's the other agenda going on globally: you keep America divided, you keep us hating each other -- that's when we're most weak. That's really how they're winning the war now. Going at us with bombs -- I believe they've realized that's just not the way to go. There's a long-term plan in place now.
HM: I remember, in the days afterward, taking the bus across town, and at every stop people got off and thanked the driver. There was this level of appreciation.
MM: Really, the bus driver was giving service -- which is absolutely true, they do it every day -- but people were acknowledging it. We're all one community; we need to be kind to each other and really unify. But I also remember when I started seeing the flags coming down, and it didn't take that long to lose that.
HM: Walk us through that morning. How did it happen for you?
MM: It was an incredibly beautiful, sunny day, like none other -- in fact, today I look outside and it feels exactly the same. Fluffy clouds, no humidity, just a beautiful day. I was still asleep; I wasn't slated to start working for the New York Post until ten o'clock. I got a phone call, and it was my mother, and she goes, "What are you doing?" I was like, "What are you talking about?" She goes, "Turn on the TV -- the towers just got hit by a plane." I was like, "What the fuck, are you kidding?" Jumped up, grabbed my gear. This was only the first plane, so you don't know what to think -- you're just thinking, all right, somebody really fucked up.
I was living in Astoria at the time, and I knew immediately they were going to start shutting down bridges and tunnels so emergency vehicles would have full access. I've been in motorcycles my whole life, but I was actually between motorcycles then, and a very dear friend of mine who lived way up in Harlem had just bought his first bike. So I beelined to him and called him, and he literally tossed his keys out the window to me. I left my vehicle there and jumped on his motorcycle with all my gear -- two cameras, as much film as I could carry, since I was still shooting film then, and my press pass -- and just started ripping downtown. I got to Broadway, and a black unmarked cruiser was flying, lights blazing, and I jumped right on his bumper, and he beelined all the way down. In that time, the other plane flew over us -- but I had no idea. I'm on a motorcycle.
As we got closer, more and more people were out on the sidewalks, everybody staring up, the crowd thicker and thicker, and the look on people's faces. They had a makeshift barrier set up that they opened for the police car, and I came right in behind him. There's all this dust, and I'm coming north to south, and all I see is one tower. One had already dropped -- but in the adrenaline I was thinking, okay, I just can't see the other tower. I parked his motorcycle behind a building, and where I was, it was almost a no man's land, because so many people had already run north to get away. There were just a few people staggering around like zombies, covered in dust. It didn't make sense. But my adrenaline was running, and our job is to keep running in -- where the action is, that's where we've got to be. I remember one officer, when I was on foot, yelled, "Where the hell fuck are you going?" And I'm like, "I'm going that way." He was like, "What are you, fucking crazy?" And I said, "No, man -- this is what we do."
So I'm heading directly south -- I think it was on West Broadway -- and all of a sudden the second one goes. I just stop, grab my camera, stand in the middle of the street, and I'm banging away as it drops.
Then the whole big dust cloud comes, and I jump behind a building, put my cameras up under my T-shirt, pull the T-shirt over my head, and go into a crouched position, no idea if any debris is coming down. The rumbling, the noise -- and then the eeriness of it, as it just went silent. You could hear a few alarms, but it was silent and pitch black. I sat there and said, okay, nothing's hit me, I'm still mobile, and I waited for the dust to settle so I could see. It got lighter and lighter, and once I could see again, I jumped up and kept heading south, banging a few shots here and there. And about a block away -- boom, there it is. Part of the facade you see in so many pictures was there in the shadows, and all of a sudden you're just like, holy shit -- they're both gone. And my day started there.
HM: I was looking at your photographs, and I love them -- well, "love" isn't the right word, but they're great.
MM: No, I get it. I've said this a couple of times in interviews: it was really one of the proudest days of my life, one of the most influential. Outside of marrying my wife and having my two kids, this was one of the most important days of my life, and I wouldn't have wanted to be anywhere else. The fact is, if I hadn't been there, I probably would have enlisted -- my life would have gone in a very different direction. Being there, within a week I was getting messages from hundreds of young men saying, "I saw your pictures. I'm enlisting. I'm going for payback." That cemented me in photography. I was like, this is what I'm supposed to be doing.
It's a weird thing to say, that it's one of my proudest moments, because you want to be careful with the families, and what that means. But many people never get tested -- truly tested, as far as what you're made of. I've had a few times in my life where I've been tested, and luckily who I believed I was, and what I'm made of, is exactly how I reacted. This was one of them. I kept going, didn't stop, didn't run. I was focused and clear on what needed to be done, and what needed to be done was to document this as much and as best as possible.
HM: You can never plan for a moment like that.
MM: You can't. People don't get these moments to be tested like that, and you don't know how you're going to respond.
HM: Professionally, it must have been an amazing moment -- nothing to do with the people who died, but this rare opportunity to record something historic that had simply never happened before.
MM: I knew right away. I was like, my God -- I'm going to be recording history forever. This will be attached to me forever: my heart, my soul, my work, everything. And I was using film, so I had to make sure -- I planned on staying as long as possible, because I knew they'd be setting up a security border around the whole area quickly, and once you leave, you're probably not getting back in. So I was shooting very conservatively, because I only had so much film on me.
HM: Everyone we've spoken to for this issue was shooting film that day. Stan Honda was ahead of the curve -- he had two of the early Nikon digital cameras.
MM: They were crazy expensive. I was shooting Nikon F4s. Actually, on a lot of my negatives you can see, as the day goes on, more and more crud getting into the cameras -- the scratches -- which to me actually adds a lot. But a lot of the negatives are really damaged and stained in places.
HM: What drew you to the firemen in particular? A close friend of mine was a fireman who survived that day -- a first responder, who later married a 9/11 widow -- and when I asked him about it for this issue, he was frank: "It was such a horrible day, I just can't talk about it." Looking at your photographs of the firefighters, I wondered what drew you to them.
MM: First off, the majority of the guys down there were firefighters. Obviously there were a lot of cops as well, and Port Authority officers. But primarily, the majority of responders were firefighters. To me, this was a firefighters' event.
I remember stopping to talk to one guy for a moment. I just looked at him and said, "Are you okay?" And he said, "I lost everyone. My whole company. They're all gone." I remember photographing one firefighter who was way off by himself, just sitting on a ledge, hunched over -- the agony. It was so incredible, these guys. The firefighter with the pike, which is one of my favorite photos, because it shows the heroism, the strength, the determination. You see it in law enforcement, you see it in the military: it takes a certain type of person who can look at a situation like that and say, "Hey, man -- I got a hand tool. This is what I got. I'm going in."
His name was Matthew Long, and he and I have met numerous times since -- really an incredible guy. When I came up behind him, the other thing happening all day was the smoke -- my God, unbelievably horrible smoke everywhere. But then the wind would shift for a moment and it would clear out, and all of a sudden there's this blazing sun and you see everything again, and then the smoke comes back in. This happened all day long. There's one of my photos, the vertical, where you see the pile and the facade and a chain of firefighters -- the first chain of guys climbing up through this rubble -- and all of a sudden the smoke clears and you see it, and you just go, holy shit, look at these guys.
With Matthew Long, I came up behind him and he startled for a moment, and I said, "Hey, man -- I'm just a photographer for the Post." He gave a nod, and then he and a buddy just kept marching through. It was such a moment -- a stance. Because we realized at that point that we'd been attacked, that this was not a mistake.
The other thing going on: by midday, early afternoon, there was word that the planes had been loaded with some kind of poison that was floating around, and that we were all dead -- that we'd all breathed it in and were all going to die. There were a lot of different rumors. But I remember when that first came through, we all stopped and kind of looked at each other, and literally everybody just said "fuck it," and everybody went back to work. Absolutely amazing.
HM: It strikes me that as everybody was running away, the firefighters' job was to run toward the danger -- and your job as a photojournalist was to run toward it too, to document it. A common instinct.
MM: Kind of like we're the sheepdogs, running into the wolves. And my friend Mark said pretty much what you just said: this is what we do.
HM: The figures are staggering -- 343 members of the department died that day, and hundreds more have died since.
MM: Yeah -- I can't remember the exact numbers now, as far as the deaths from health reasons. I've been checked. I've had my lungs checked; I have a little bit of diminished capacity, and I'm susceptible to bronchitis if I'm in really high smoke- or dust-filled environments for a long period of time. When I was in Haiti covering the earthquake, after about two weeks I started getting bronchitis and they had to pull me out and bring me home.
For me, the doctors said, listen -- in high doses, your body actually can cleanse it out. It's the guys who were there day after day after day on the piles -- all that crap and the toxins really gets into the meat of your body and into the blood. That's the killer. So, knock on wood, so far I'm okay. You just never know.
But hold on -- I will say this. Health risk or not, I wouldn't change a thing. Now, hopefully I don't get sick and change that tune. But honestly, I would not change a thing.
HM: It was so unknown, what was in the air. I was down there cooking for the rescuers and searchers, wearing a surgical mask, and a FEMA guy walked by, looked at me, and said, "That's not going to help." He handed me a real gas mask and said, "You just don't know what kind of shit's in this air."
MM: Oh, God -- remember, it was green and yellow for a long period of time. And it's funny: there are a couple of guys I know who were there as well, and we all have the same reaction. Even now, if you're driving past a fire, something burning -- there's a certain combination of materials that has that smell, and man, it takes you right back. I'm like, damn, there's that smell. That's whatever crap was burning, and it was toxic stuff. To this day, it's an immediate flashback.
HM: Were any other photographers around you while you were photographing?
MM: There were probably six guys I knew that I ran into down there. But right in the hole of it, in the mass of it, there weren't a lot -- it wasn't until later in the day that you started seeing more people. Now, there was a media event with Giuliani going on that morning -- if I recall correctly; again, it's twenty-five years -- so there was media down there, and that's why a couple of guys actually got killed and injured, because they were in close proximity to the buildings for the event.
There's an old friend of mine -- he's retired now -- who got banged up pretty good on the leg, and he literally stopped me and said, "Man, take my picture," with his leg all bleeding and his clothes cut off. I go, okay -- click, click. That picture is actually now in the Congressional Library, and whenever I see him he gives me a huge hug: "Thank you so much for taking that for me."
HM: Did you ask any photographer friend to photograph you?
MM: No, that's the funny thing. I don't have anything at all. I've been around I don't know how many presidents, you name it, and one thing I've never done is say, "Hey, take my picture." It's just not where my head goes. There have been movies and documentary footage, and I've watched thinking, I've got to be in here somewhere. I had a photography vest at the time that I still have. My boots got tossed, because the soles had melted -- I was jumping from beam to beam with the smoke and fire blowing out of them.
HM: So you really were in the thick of it.
MM: Oh, yeah. I was climbing around the whole pile. At one point -- and I don't even think I took a picture; I was almost off somewhere else -- there was this giant hole in the rubble, and you realize you're three, four stories up in rubble, and looking down through it there was a clean sidewalk and a fire hydrant. I remember thinking, wow, that's weird. And the massive beams you're walking along and jumping around on -- you're constantly watching your footing. It was like zones: the pile was over here, activity over there, so you're constantly moving and moving and moving.
There were moments where everyone just kind of stopped and took a breath and looked at each other. That determination again -- but also a lot of vacant stares, especially as the day went on and everything was sinking in, the adrenaline tapering off, the exhaustion hitting. The stone-cold stares of firefighters. Nobody had ever seen or experienced anything like this -- really, not since World War II, since Pearl Harbor. This was our Pearl Harbor. But it was against civilians, and it's a different mindset to attack civilians versus a military installation.
HM: Do you remember what you felt, what you thought, through all of this -- running around taking pictures?
MM: You know what's interesting -- people have asked, how do you do it in the moment? And the camera is, in a sense -- I don't want to say a block, but when I'm doing this, my emotions get cut off. I've been around a lot of death, and it just gets cut off. It's not until later, really, when you might be sitting at a bar with a glass of whiskey, going, "Holy shit. Wow."
But it's an interesting question, to try to think back to how I felt. I felt very determined. I felt very driven being there. The level of importance hit me immediately -- that I needed to be at the top of my game and do this right. But I was also trying to be as gentle as I could with the guys around me, to do things respectfully. I remember one guy yelled at me, "What are you taking my fucking picture for?" And you can't be pissed off about that. Everyone was dealing with the shock of this in their own manner.
And then there was Mike Bellatone, the firefighter praying on the axe -- that's one of the most famous ones of mine from that day. I remember taking a moment, putting the camera down, and just taking a breath. And then, for whatever reason, I turned around, and I see him going down, taking a knee, taking a moment. It was three frames -- click, click, click -- and he got up, and I went up to him. I said, "Hey, man -- you okay? Were you just doing what I think you were doing?" He's like, "Yeah, man. Look, I got to get to work. I got to go."
That photo became very, very famous. There's actually a nine-story mural of it on Third Avenue and 49th right now, done by the graffiti artist Cobra, put up about three years ago. I've seen it in tattoos; I've seen it all over the place. He and I have talked numerous times since. He became one of the main guys at the memorial services, so I would see him. I know the fame of it was tough for him at first -- we've since talked, and I met up with him and gave him a printed, framed picture of it. Now when I see him, it's always a big hug.
It was just a moment. I spun around, and there he was. The axe he had -- he came from Staten Island; they came across on the ferry, and they didn't have any tools, so he instinctively grabbed something. The axe was off the ferry.
HM: Is that the same man other photographers photographed, or is yours the only image?
MM: I think mine is the only one of that. I've never seen anybody else with it -- it was a quick moment. Between that shot and the firefighter with the pike, those two really sum it up: the despair and the pain, but also the determination and the fortitude.
HM: The fireman you've kept in touch with -- what does he tell you when you meet? How does he manage?
MM: We don't really talk about it. It's just, "Hey, man, how you doing? Good to see you. How's the family? What's the detail you're working on now?" We never talk about it. I would wait for him to bring it up -- it's not something I would push. We're very happy to see each other, and we both know we'll have that shared moment for the rest of our lives. But it's a conversation I would never press.
HM: Is he still a fireman?
MM: I believe he's still active, yes. I haven't seen him in a couple of years, but a couple of years ago he was still active, doing memorial work at the memorials. Still in uniform.
HM: What would you say to young photographers today? What advice would you give them?
MM: Take business classes. That's it, man. Take business classes. We all get into this -- I got into it for the art, the artist side of me, but also the adventurer side, and also wanting to make a difference in life. For what we do, we're really in the front seat of the roller coaster of life. We're right there -- we're smelling it, we're stepping in it, we're living it. But I've got to tell you: you ain't gonna get rich. It's not an easy profession to pursue, and it's getting harder and harder as the years go on.
I've talked to kids at schools, and I'm amazed. Listen, I love the darkroom. My years in the darkroom, I loved it; that was my space. I still have my whole darkroom packed up somewhere. But I was at a college and they were like, "Yeah, we're in the darkroom," and I'm like -- wait, you're still doing darkroom? That's a waste of money and time; that's not going to do shit for you. That craft isn't lost, but I tell them: take business classes, round out your education. None of us -- we're all pretty bad at the business end of things. It's a dying profession. We're all the last men standing right now.
HM: You were working for the Post, and the Post back then was all about breaking the news first, having the images first. How did the deadline shape up? And what happened to the motorcycle?
MM: So again, I was shooting conservatively, really picking my shots to save film, because I was planning on staying -- I wasn't going anywhere. I was actually one of the last photographers to be accounted for, because we had no phones working. My mother kept calling the Post asking if they'd heard from me, and they finally lied to her -- they had no answers, so they just said, "Yeah, yeah, he's fine," to calm her down. She's watching it on TV thinking, my son's dead -- I'm her only child. And my stepfather, who's ex-military, kept telling her, "Matt knows how to operate. Matt knows what he's doing. He's going to be fine."
I finally got a call out -- I think it was about six or seven o'clock -- and I called the Post, and they were like, "One: are you alive? Okay, good. Two: we need your stuff." I said, "Listen, once I leave…" and they said, "No, no, no. Get up here now. We need your stuff now." So, okay. I remember I was kind of hobbling, covered in dirt, just a mess, and I walked out, and the bike was covered in dust but right where I left it, because I'd purposely parked it against the side of a building that would block it. I hopped on the motorcycle and raced up to Midtown, to the offices of the Post. I think one of the bosses let me take a shower, if I recall correctly, because I was just covered -- God, it's so vague now. They had people on standby waiting for me, and they did the processing, did everything, really quick. I think I had the back cover the next day -- I think it was the fireman on the axe. I had stuff inside too, but I can't remember what; it was so long ago.
And because we did it so quickly, I didn't go back to the negatives until ten years later -- and all of a sudden there was all this other work there, and I was like, oh my God. The Post did a documentary about it, a film of me going through them. There was just an amazing amount of work that I'd never gone back to look at.
HM: What was running through your mind as you went through them?
MM: It was a combination. I kind of felt like an asshole for not going back through it sooner. Why didn't I? I own my negatives; I have them. Part of it is, you just immediately keep working. That's one thing about our job: okay, this job's done, tomorrow's another day, another job, and you keep going and going. Photographers generally, I find, don't really plan for the future, because we're all living in the moment. So I felt a little bit of embarrassment that it took me ten years. And there was work in there that was really quite amazing, and I thought, wow, that's a real shame. But it is what it is. I was just glad I finally did it -- and it was new work brought out for the world to see.
HM: It's so interesting, that transition -- coming back from the battlefield to the office. It must be unbelievable.
MM: It's funny -- I actually felt like a real badass in many ways, because you're looking around and everybody's clean, and food's everywhere, and I come soldiering in from the battlefield. I was like, yeah, that's right, motherfuckers -- I was right there. I felt proud of it. I survived, I did my job, and now you're presenting to your bosses: here, look what I did -- do right by it. There was real pride in that. It was all day -- I think it was about seven o'clock by the time I rolled back in.
HM: And now you're a digital photographer.
MM: Oh, yeah. I think it was shortly after 9/11 that I finally got digital cameras. My F4s I saved -- I have those wrapped up and put away. You never know -- film might come back. Look at vinyl. My eight-year-old boy rides with me on my motorcycle now, and we just passed this tiny little store that was all vinyl, and I was like, look at that! It really is coming back.
One thing about digital cameras is you can shoot more and more, faster and faster. So what ends up happening is you get paid the same amount of money, but you do double the amount of work, because you don't have to run it into the soup. We live by the stopwatch -- deadlines, and everything is just now, now, now, fast.
All images © Matthew McDermott