Stan Honda: Bearing Witness on September 11

SH: I made it downtown sometime after eight. The 6 train ended at City Hall, and I may have been on one of the last trains to run.

When I came out, there were thousands of people looking toward the World Trade Center. It was a beautiful day, as everybody remembers.

I looked up and saw smoke coming from both towers. That confused me because I had heard only about one plane. I immediately began photographing.

I knew the area well from working for Agence France-Presse. I headed south and immediately ran into hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people running north. I was moving against the crowd.

SH: Very little. Cell phones were not functioning, and there were no smartphones giving us live information.

I assumed everything could be important, so I photographed almost anything I could see. Most people were fleeing. Police officers and firefighters were helping people. Nobody truly understood what was happening.

SH: I have a couple of frames of the building beginning to fall apart. I heard a tremendous noise, like a very loud train. Then I saw this enormous cloud of smoke, dust and debris moving toward us.

I was only a couple of blocks away. Within perhaps a minute it became so dark you couldn’t see anything. It was like night.

Near Broadway, I saw a police officer pulling people off the sidewalk into a building. I went inside, and we waited under the artificial lights while it remained completely dark outside.

SH: A woman walked in completely covered in dust. She reminded me of photographs of figures from Pompeii—you could barely make out her features. It was stunning to see someone who had survived the collapse and made it that far.

I took only one frame of her. Someone realized she might be in trouble and helped her upstairs. That was the last I saw of her until weeks later.

SH: No. In a situation like that, you don’t know which image will become important. I made the photograph and kept moving. Only later could I look carefully at the frame and begin to understand what it contained.

SH: The scene looked almost as though it had snowed. The ground, buildings, vehicles and people were all covered with gray dust.

I photographed a man in a business suit making his way through it. Later I noticed he was still carrying his briefcase. I hadn’t seen it when I made the picture. After all that chaos, he still had the instinct to hold on to it.

SH: It connected this unimaginable disaster to an ordinary working morning. He had gone to work in a suit, carrying a briefcase, and suddenly found himself trying to survive the collapse of the World Trade Center.

SH: After the second tower collapsed, I found a bank where a landline telephone was still working. I called Maria Mann, our photo chief in Washington.

She told me two planes had struck the World Trade Center, another had hit the Pentagon, and a fourth was still unaccounted for in the reports at that moment. All of that was news to me. Until that call, I had almost no understanding of the larger event.

SH: I was working digitally, but I didn’t have a laptop and there were no reliable connections for transmitting.

There was no normal transportation, so I walked from Lower Manhattan to the AFP bureau on 46th Street. When I reached the office, I transmitted the photographs.

SH: For a news photographer, the instinct is to move toward the action—to ask: Where is this happening? How can I record it?

That is the job, but it is also how we inform the public. If we cannot see the event, we cannot show other people what is happening. Moving toward the World Trade Center was instinctive.

SH: The camera can be a kind of shield. You have a purpose: to make the photograph and witness what is happening for other people.

The deeper thoughts come afterward. During the event, you concentrate on seeing, responding and working the camera.

SH: Hearing her story was deeply moving. She had recently found an office job at Bank of America in one of the towers. Working in a major Manhattan office was an important step forward for her. Then this disaster happened around her.

The experience traumatized her. Eventually I lost contact with her, and years later I learned she had died of stomach cancer. That was very sad to hear.

SH: For me, yes. On September 11, I was focused on the work. Beginning September 12, you saw the impact on individual people.

There were posters everywhere from families searching for missing people: “Have you seen this person?” Each included a photograph of someone they loved.

My wife and I did not lose a relative or close friend, but the firehouses in our neighborhood lost firefighters. The event reached every part of New York.

SH: I hope the photographs give them a sense of how human beings dealt with catastrophe and chaos. Marcy Borders and Edward Fine didn’t know exactly what was happening. They only knew they had survived and were trying to find their way out.

I think people respond to those photographs because they show individuals moving through an almost unimaginable situation. There is a little hope in that.

September 11 has an enormous archive of broadcasts, video and still photography. Those records allow later generations to see not only the scale of the event but what happened to individual people.

That human detail is what I was trying to preserve—what people were doing, how they were coping and how they were helping one another.

SH: Get the story. Get the picture. Show people what is happening, and show them the truth.

Today there is so much manipulated and fabricated information. Throughout my career, editors repeated the same principle: the image is sacred. Do not alter its content.

You are there on behalf of people who cannot be there. You have to remain truthful to what is in front of you.

SH: People ask whether September 11 was the biggest story I ever covered. Of course it was. But I hope I never see anything like it again.

A catastrophe may produce important photographs and define a photographer’s career, but no photographer should wish for an event like that simply because it creates powerful pictures.

SH: We tell stories with images. The responsibility is to witness what is happening, tell the story truthfully and let people know what you saw.

In that sense, the photographer becomes an eye for the rest of the world.