Watching the World Change: Robert Clark

RC: My fiancée at the time called and said a plane hit the World Trade Center. I turned around, looked out my windows, and the very first pictures of this were shot from my apartment -- window frames and all. Then I ran up the stairs from the fourth floor to the eleventh. I was going to Thailand in two days for [National] Geographic, so I grabbed my backpack and a bag of film and ran to the roof. I was the first person up there. I'm composing, just following the smoke, and all of a sudden that plane -- I just kind of see it. I could have just as easily been looking elsewhere. It was fortuitous that I was not. Robin, my neighbor, had come up on the roof -- and I just remember her screaming as I shot it. The planes are sharp in the first frames, and the third frame is the tiniest bit soft.

RC: The weird effect of how slowly sound moves compared to light. The sound of the crash hit us eight to ten seconds later, and it just felt like somebody turned a big fan on us. I really felt that. There wasn't any heat -- it was just this push of air. Robin and I looked at each other, and she came over and we hugged. And after about a minute, all these people started coming up to the roof. It was a really intense experience. Somebody at NBC said later it had been the kind of day "that put you in a good mood -- perfectly clear, incredibly beautiful, pristine sky, no humidity.” And it was absolutely true.

RC: The plane was dark blue, and being a kid of the seventies, my first thought was: my God, it's the Russians. And then my first clear thought -- [President] Bush was having a really hard time right at that moment -- was: this means he gets anything he wants. I said to my fiancée afterward, I was watching the world change. That's what I called the pictures -- years before anybody else put that phrase on anything.

RC: Oh no. No. It's just not how I'm wired. I had worked enough for Sports Illustrated and shot enough sports that you don't watch. You try to record it.

RC: Absolutely. I'd covered the Bengals–49ers Super Bowl in Miami. I shot the World Series when the Reds swept the A's. In sports, everything happens on the field at once and you don't have time to think. You have to be present. That's where the reflex comes from. You're in the moment. Boom.

RC: We just had cell phones. I called Alice Gabriner [Time magazine’s chief picture editor] from the roof -- hers was the first number that popped into my head. I had just done a cover story for her at Time, the rebuilding-of-America issue; we must have talked fifty times while I was working on it. She picked up and I said, "Alice, there are times when you're shooting sports and you know you got it. I knew I did. I got the second plane hitting the tower." And she said, "Okay, we'll buy it. See you whenever you get here." I stayed on the roof until both towers came down, and then I went downtown. But it was sealed off. If I had it to do over again, I never would have taken no for an answer. I think I was in shock.

RC: I rode my bike across the 59th Street Bridge. And here's a footnote: a guy named Chris lived in the building too, and he had a video camera, and I'd told him, put that on a tripod. He put it on a tripod, and the second plane came in, and he had the only tripod-steady image of it -- super sharp. On my tripod. I probably should have charged a rental fee.

RC: The film came in, and Ken Regan of Camera 5 (a New York-based photo agency) was up there -- he was close with the photo department, and he was the first person to look at the film. He looked at it, looked back at it, looked back at it again. I hadn't seen it yet. And he said, "Congratulations." Which was kind of a strange thing to hear. But he didn't mean it the way it sounds. He said: "This is history." And it was. Then I looked at it, then MaryAnne Golon (Time magazine’s Director of Photography) looked at it, and we laid out twenty slides, and she said, "Okay, we're going to do a series."

The luck of it is that I could have been on frame 35 at the wrong moment. I've always said the only thing worse than shooting it would have been missing it. That would have been horrific. It's like the Hindenburg.

RC: Chris Anderson called me and said, do you know any apartments in the building? The third floor was just being opened up. So I got an apartment for Christopher Anderson, Alex Majoli, Thomas Dworzak, Paolo Pellegrin, David Alan Harvey. Harvey started doing all these workshops -- loud and raucous, drinking, projecting pictures, talking about work -- and he'd say, I've got some photographers here and it's loud over there, do you mind having them come in? So into my apartment walk Elliott Erwitt, Bruce Davidson, Mary Ellen Mark, Josef Koudelka. I'm pulling books off my shelf and pouring drinks. And then they all went off.

RC: Tim shared an office with Chris in my photo studio, and he lived in the building as well. He went to Oxford at sixteen. He was smart -- and he was so sweet. His mother gave me a print after the posthumous exhibit at Yossi Milo's gallery, the little boy in West Africa with the soccer ball he made, the one that won World Press. She wrote me a letter in memory of Tim.

RC: And I told him the truth: "I have a very complicated relationship with those pictures." He asked if I'd show them that night, at the smaller session, and talk about all of it. And I said yes. And I did.

RC: Three thousand people died. That's the scale of the day. Jim Nachtwey was down there -- he had to jump into an elevator when the towers came down, and they couldn't reach him for hours. They thought he might be dead. Everybody was terrified. I think for years I've had PTSD from that day, and I never talked about it. It kind of surprises me. I probably should have. I don’t know, I think for 20 years, I’ve never looked back in all this film.

RC: A friend who was asleep in bed that morning, yes. And his wife -- the bluntest person in the world -- said, “What? You were going to shoot those? You were asleep. Nobody works harder than Rob.” He'd assisted me; he knew what my fifteen-, sixteen-, seventeen-hour days on the road looked like. He said, “Okay, you're right.” We're still great friends. But there's truth on both sides of it. It was luck that I was on that roof looking in the right direction. It was not luck that the frames are sharp, composed, exposed, and at Time magazine by that afternoon. Somebody once asked me why I was any good, and I said: constant fear of failure. Although at this age, I don't want to be driven by my fears anymore.

RC: The walls -- the posters, the flyers on the side of St. Vincent's. Have you seen this person. All the public gatherings at Washington Square Park. I was grabbing whatever film was in my bag, and some of it was tungsten film -- the wrong film -- so some of it's shot poorly, but nonetheless. The fire trucks that were destroyed, where people wrote R.I.P. in the dust.

RC: The Saturday before, I met Anne Tucker at a wedding out in the Hamptons, my friend Todd France put us at the same table. That Monday, Time ran a piece saying she was the best curator in America of any subject. And then Tuesday happened. She later did a book on the history of war photography, and a military historian in Texas who advised on it said something I'd never thought about: it's rare that you ever see a picture of a war starting. The exhibit went to the Brooklyn Museum and the Corcoran, and at the Corcoran my pictures were outside the entrance -- you had to look at my pictures, walk around my pictures, into the exhibit. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston has them in the collection, and five or six other museums do too.

RC: Richard Drew's picture of the Falling Man. That's the image that just haunts me. Talk about an incredible photographer -- so well-rounded, AP for a thousand years. I think that should have won the Pulitzer, but that's just me. The [New York] Times won for their portfolio, and they're good -- the only picture I remember from it is Edward Keating's: a china set in a window, covered in dust.

RC: Both, probably. There's always been manipulation around images -- there's always been censorship. You remember that picture of the tourist standing on the observation deck with the plane coming in behind him? That was one of the first visual fakes that people really bought into. It even ended up in the war photography book. And journalism has had such a hard time.

RC: For twenty years I've never looked back into all this film. It was such a weird moment in the city. I'm going to grab some of those and get them scanned.

RC: To me, 9/11 is a personal landmark, an emotional landmark -- and it was the end of film photography, essentially. Digital started to take over, because of the immediacy of it. I had the first digital cover of Geographic not long after. Chris's picture was six megs; my Sony Ericsson book a few years later was a 3.5-meg file.

RC: I've had insomnia, and I've been walking around at night shooting pictures of empty restaurants through the windows, empty stores. I'm calling it Insomnia Journal. I also found a journal I kept my first year in New York -- I'm naming all these friends I've met, the day I met them. It's 1992 in there. It's a reminder to maintain your friendships. Out of the thirty or forty guys I knew when I was first shooting, four of them are still shooting.

RC: My daughter came home from school -- they had shown the kids some pictures of 9/11 and talked about it. And she said, "There are these pictures of the second plane hitting the buildings." And I looked at my wife and said, "Can I show you something?" And I typed in Robert Clark 9/11 photos, and they popped up. It blew her mind. We'd had dinner together almost every night of her life, the three of us -- we talk about journalism, we talk about ethics; her mother is second in charge of standards at NBC. But she'd never put it together. And then we talked about it -- that her mom called me that morning, that I ran to the roof, that I picked her mom up that night on the bicycle. She sat on the handlebars, and we went down Fifth Avenue. No cars, no traffic. You couldn't get below 23rd Street, so she got her ID out — "I live at Washington Square Park" — and they let us through. The city was just so still.

RC: Honestly, the fact that I shot this stuff doesn't matter. The fact that somebody shot this stuff does matter.

RC: I would much rather be known for a picture like Margaret Bourke-White's Gandhi at the spinning wheel -- I'm trying to buy a print of it. It's just human. But I was there, and I got them in focus, and the pictures are what they are: I was watching the world change. That's what I called them.