They Captured 9/11 on Film
What is the proper response to this glut of photographic information?

BY RICHARD B. WOODWARD
Thursday, September 7, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

Photographs were once as evanescent as snowflakes. The most vexing problem for inventors of the process in the 1820s and '30s was devising a chemical formula to prevent developed images from disappearing. Subjects had to be stationary and well-illuminated to register as more than a smudge on the polished copper plates or waxed-paper negatives. Historic buildings became a favorite topic of early French and English photographers in part because they didn't move.

But by the 1880s cameras were able to show what no one had ever seen--a horse's hooves frozen in midair--and photographs themselves were so prevalent they piled up as clutter. (Glass-plate negatives depicting the American Civil War were recycled as roof panels for greenhouses.) As more things have vanished from the land of the living every year, not only family members and heads of state but also animal species and entire countries, a mechanical device that records the flickering present has created decade-by-decade an increasingly permanent and organized archive of the past, an ossuary of individual and national memory.

The millions of pictures generated on and soon after Sept. 11, 2001, represent the triumph of this technology. The reaction of many in the New York and Washington areas that day, after staring in disbelief at buildings aflame on their television screens, was to reach for their cameras. At 8:49:36 a.m. CNN broadcast a long shot of smoke from the North Tower of the World Trade Center, the first in a stream of images that in a sense has never ceased. The books and network specials rolled out on each anniversary serve to buttress the claim that the attacks on the U.S. are the most documented event in history.

David Friend's "Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11" is the latest addition to the shelf. An account of the amateurs and professionals who for various reasons took pictures of the disaster may seem excessive, even decadent. Its appearance five years on suggests we have passed into a new phase of the catastrophe, and it is fair to wonder if, to feed our obsession with the spectacle of annihilation, we now need to commemorate the lives of the documentarians.

Mr. Friend makes a convincing case that we should. His book is a fast-paced chronicle of that chaotic week as seen from those behind the lens. He turns a familiar story around and helps us understand why we saw events as we did. Some indelible moments were captured by chance. The German artist Wolfgang Staehle, his video cameras trained on lower Manhattan and linked to computers for an experimental project in synchronicity, seems to have been the first person to transmit images of the crashes over the Internet. Gedeon and Jules Naudet, shooting a film about the Duane Street firehouse, were out with a group of firemen who had responded to a gas leak when Jules heard a roar overhead and raised his Sony PD150 as the American airlines jet knifed into the North Tower. Mr. Friend calls the nine hours of footage the French brothers shot that day "the true Zapruder film of the New York terror attacks."

A number of figures he interviews captured scenes of horror--bodies disintegrating as people who jumped from the towers hit the ground--that editors had the decency not to let us see. Professional photographers don't often shy away from people in the throes of grief, but several turned their cameras away out of respect. The event provoked inventive responses and some of the finest were indirect records. Mary Ellen Mark photographed the façades of firehouses. Kevin Bubriski took portraits of visitors staring at Ground Zero. Amateurs snapped away through windows from inside their apartments, framing the burning towers next to houseplants on the sills.

Mr. Friend also has an excellent analysis of al Qaeda's cunning media strategy. Not only did they turn our passenger jets into weapons against us but our cameras as well. Osama bin Laden said afterward that he had not expected a collapse of the towers, and he knew one plane would not level the Pentagon. But he guessed correctly that television loves a fire. Delivering periodic shocks to the U.S. and its allies by videotape, he has relied on the photographic image to rally followers, threaten the infidels, and prove to the world he remains alive.

What Mr. Friend doesn't address is the meaning of these images today. A former director of photography at Life and currently a special-projects editor at Vanity Fair, he falls back on the notion of photographers as heroes and the medium as a humanizing force. He believes we should "take a small measure of comfort in knowing that there were thousands among us who had the poise and wherewithal to pick up cameras so that the world might witness and respond."

But the proper response to the glut of information gathered by these machines seems less clear with every anniversary. Is it helpful or even healthy to re-experience a national trauma? The formal memorializing of Dec. 7, 1941, did not begin until 1947. Photographs of the sunken USS Arizona were commonly reproduced only after the war was won. Are we aggrandizing Muslim extremists and spreading terror by rebroadcasting or repackaging this example of an al Qaeda success with such abandon? Or by revisiting that day through photographs are we reminding ourselves to stay vigilant?

The technology exists to allow people to spend the rest of their lives re-creating that day, taking it apart minute-by-minute and trying to put it back together again. It is now buildings that rapidly disappear, while digital storage and retrieval of information offers the promise of images that don't fade and countless opportunities for enhancement, editing and playback of an experience. Other electronic devices were busy that day as well. Every year new pieces of final conversations between the living and the soon-to-be-dead, recorded on answering machines and cellphones, are released to the media.

Some of us have come to dread television's ritual broadcasts on the anniversary. It is as if producers, perhaps with the best of intentions, will not rest until the documentary material from 9/11 has been recomposed as a kind of hi-tech Wagnerian opera, the keening electronic sounds of the doomed cross-cut with symbols of capitalism ablaze, the fallen towers as America's Götterdämmerung.

The pictures from that day, shorn of pious commentary, have lost none of their power over the past five years. Although any contemporary novel set in New York that does not deal with its impact might be said to lack ambition, many writers have struggled to compete with its reality. If the weak box-office results for Paul Greengrass's "United 93" and Oliver Stone's "World Trade Center" are any sign, filmmakers have an even harder time persuading audiences to accept a dramatized account when the documentary images remain omnipresent. With the consequences of 9/11 still so unsettled, for New York, Washington and the world, the last thing most people seem ready to accept is a Hollywood ending.

Ellie