The Images of 9/11

I think for most people, the images of 9/11 are painful memories. For some, they are too painful to consider reliving. These are images of planes flying into towering skyscrapers, flames shooting out, black smoke billowing out into the blue sky. They are the tears and expressions of shock looming on the faces of helpless onlookers. There is the gray dust with a brownish tinge and flecks of black projectiles pouring into the streets, covering everything in its path in a thick layer of ash. Emergency workers struggling to breathe push forward toward the disaster, while everyone else runs in droves away from the scene. We're inundated with images everyday, and we've become desensitized to it, but on this day, it all takes on a different tone.

Perhaps it's because I'm an artist, a filmmaker and a photojournalist, but it's the images of this day that define it for me. When I see the footage, it's so unbelievable, shocking, even nine years later, I can't help but be drawn in by it. I don't have a personal connection to the events of that day. I didn't know anyone who worked in the buildings that were attacked, or that were on the planes. I had been to New York before the attacks and I've been back since, and nothing feels any different about the city to me. My own recollections that tenuously connect me to that day, aside from the television coverage that most of us experienced come from two sources. I had been at a wedding in Maine the weekend before and was driving back home Monday night, the 10th. On my way back to Rochester, I was passing by Albany at the point on the Thruway where one can head south toward New York or continue west home. For a fleeting moment I looked at that sign and thought I could take that turn and head south, just for the night. I'm not exactly sure why, but it seems that no matter how far I am from New York, when I see that sign, I always have that same thought. I guess it has to do with the draw of the city as a center of art and culture, that somehow being there will fulfill some dream that I have about being a part of that energy. Of course, as quickly as the thought entered my mind, it left, and I continued home.

The second source of connection actually happened the day after on the 12th of September. It was my first day at a new job, my first job since graduating college the previous May. It wasn't just any job though. It was at a television station, the ABC affiliate, where one might think I would have suddenly found myself surrounded by chaos. On the contrary, it was about as quiet as a newsroom could get, something I have not experienced in the nine years since. Everyone was a bit in a daze, staring at the images on the monitors spread all over the room, with nothing to do but watch, much like the rest of the world. Every bit of coverage for those first few days was done by the networks, 24 hours a day for the first few days. It wouldn't be until later that week that we would even have the opportunity to cover anything from a local angle. And so all we could do was watch.

I suppose this is a big part of the reason why I connect to the images, difficult as they might be to see. They are the reality of what happened, and sometimes we must face reality if we expect to overcome it. In a lot of ways, I dread these anniversaries, because I know I'll have to cover the countless ceremonies, or talk to family members of victims. Perhaps I'll have to cover another story about the proposed mosque near Ground Zero. Or maybe it will be more fallout from a proposed Koran burning. Whatever the story, it feels like a distraction, and in many cases it just doesn't ring true to me.

Everyone deals with these things in their own way. There's no right or wrong way to deal with it. So after avoiding it all day, I flipped on the History channel this evening to catch a program filled not with interviews and ominous narration, but raw footage from dozens, if not hundreds of cameras around the city that day, minute by minute, accompanied by 911 calls, unfiltered commentary of the people behind the cameras, natural sounds and reactions of people on the street. It took me back in a different way. It didn't tug at my heart strings in a manipulative way. It didn't make me angry in a false sense. It allowed me to experience it again, purely through the video footage, captured in real time, without a lot of the slick graphics and polish, without commercial interruption and without someone else's ideas about what I should feel.

I'm sure that for those of us who lived through it, whether we were there in the thick of the disaster, or we were halfway around the world watching it unfold on TV, these things will never be easy to watch. I'm sure that we will always commemorate it in some way, and deal with it in our own way. And so for me, I deal through seeing. I remember through watching and observing. I understand the world through images, when others might turn away. When we pick up a camera, we must realize what power we hold in our hands. There is no way of knowing when we might find ourselves documenting something important, even historic.