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November 20, 2008 |
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Created and Maintained by: The Photoimaging Information Council |
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Reviewed by Nicole Tourtelot |
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Writing about photography is a difficult enterprise. Surely the age of the adage “A picture is worth a thousand words” testifies to its validity, begging the question: What can one say about photographs that they don’t already say themselves? Out of the tyranny of this truism comes David Friend’s new book Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11, in which he examines the circumstances—individual and global—that allowed the world to bear collective witness to the events of September 11, 2001.  cover, Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11 by David Friend. Hardcover, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006
Friend provides much-needed context to the images that have become entrenched in our collective experience, interviewing scores of photojournalists, some of whom are seasoned professionals, and others who had never taken photos outside of their own families, yet emerged from the war zone in downtown Manhattan with some of the best documentation of the day. He memorializes industry professionals who spent the last few hours of their lives doing what they were born to do.  A knot of bystanders at Park Row and Beekman Street look up as the south tower begins to collapse. (Photograph by Patrick Witty)
Photojournalist Bill Biggart assured his wife when she finally found him downtown that he would be safe if he stayed with the firemen, and agreed to meet up with her in 20 minutes. That was the last time she saw him. In addition to a few rolls of slightly light-streaked film, his digital memory card survived the collapse, leaving behind 154 photographs—a frame-by-frame account of the disaster.  Freelance photographer Bill Biggart was killed in the north tower’s collapse. Crews recovered his battered equipment – and some three hundred pictures. (Photography by Tom McKitterick).
As Friend writes of Biggart’s film: “A lone bird flies away as Two World Trade Center (the south tower, Tower Two) spews fire. Clots of smoke and cloud stream out as the tower crashes to the earth…Biggart’s last image, of the splintered stalk of Tower Two, obscured by smoke, was framed just six seconds before the other tower crumbled above him at 10:28 and 31 seconds.” Friend gives us the stories behind the photographs and their creators; journalists who were the first (and sometimes the only) witnesses to history, some of whom missed seeing it with their own eyes because they were filming other witnesses—the crowd watching the collapse—or, because they were watching the LCD screen of a video camera, essentially having the same experience, though closer in a corporeal sense, as “eye-witnesses” watching at home on their television sets.  News of the attacks sent many New Yorkers into the streets with cameras. Here, a photographer turns away from the disaster to capture a tearful stranger who has set her camera aside. (Photography by Cynthia Colwell)
The image that would become the jacket photo of Friend’s book—a man with a camera running towards the viewer with a colossal cloud of smoke at his heels—was taken by Kelly Price with a disposable camera she bought at a bodega after the first tower fell. The man, as it turns out, is George Mannes, then a senior writer for TheStreet.com, but at that particular moment, a war photographer intrepid as any other. Friend expands his analysis to television images, to the acceleration of history that occurs when 2 billion people tune in. He writes: “The sequences of the towers collapsing (and many of the still photos that we now consider the key images of the event) did not enter the public consciousness like other historical moments caught on film or tape. These were not pictorial watersheds that accrued acceptance with the years—the three-year-old son of an assassinated president saluting his father’s casket in 1963; a lone protester staring down a tank in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989. Instead, these were news clips that gained traction in the public skull through hourly repetition in an accelerated and emotionally supercharged time span—a single week. The life cycle from news clip to video icon was compressed to days, not decades.”  Two agonized onlookers react to the horror (Photograph by Angel Franco / The New York Times)
Watching the World Change is a difficult book to read, but a necessary book, written by possibly the only person qualified for such an undertaking. Friend, who started as a reporter for Life magazine, learned in the field from the photographers he accompanied on assignment; greats such as Mary Ellen Mark, Harry Benson, Michael O’Brien, Gene Richards, and Don McCullin. Formerly the director of photography at Life, Friend is currently Vanity Fair’s editor of creative development, and the man responsible for the February 2002 cover, where Bush and his cabinet posed for an exclusive Annie Leibovitz shoot; unprecedented for a president in time of war.
TakeGreatPictures.com (TGP): How long after 9/11 did you decide to write this? David Friend (DF): I decided before 9/11. I always had the thesis that you can take the DNA of a week through its pictures, of any slice of time. And that people tend not to regard pictures with the importance now that they regard the internet, or the importance they regard words, or other symbols of reality. But pictures are so vital in modern society that I’ve always felt you could summarize history through just the pictures generated in a short span of time. And I never had a vehicle to express that. Then I encountered the events of 9/11 on TV screens. I walked into Times Square and looked up, and on the three big jumbotrons in Times Square, I saw this spectacle of terror. So from that moment, it was a visual experience.  Smoke plumes are clearly visible in this Landsat 7 satellite image of New York City, made early September 12. (Photograph courtesy of NASA)
And then, within three months, I began to see the pattern of pictures, pictures, pictures. We use pictures to hunt down terrorists, we use pictures on our bomb runs in Afghanistan. We use pictures at these ceremonies where people would hold up photographs of their lost loved ones. And it seemed like a natural thing. So I then did a I did a piece on photography, I proposed a piece and wrote a piece that appeared in Vanity Fair on the first anniversary. So within the first three months, I began to see this and felt it was a thesis. TGP: There have been stories in the press recently about photographers—John McCusker, for one, who photographed the devastation in New Orleans for the Times-Picayune—and the ramifications of documenting tragedy on that level. Do you think it’s possible to take photographs that are that historically important and survive with your psyche intact? Or do you lose a piece of yourself? DF: You know...I don’t know. I think it’s hard to go through life with your psyche intact if you’re experiencing it. You get buffeted about by what’s going on in the world. When you deal with trauma, one of the risks is that you will be traumatized because you’re not just a camera, or a reporter with a pen and pad, you’re a living, breathing human being. Until we get to the stage where everything is taken with a stationary camera or a robot-cam, we will have intrepid photojournalists who put themselves at risk in order to open up everybody else’s eyes. They may suffer damage because they’re trying to tell the world that the world needs to wake up and not cause all this damage.  “Missing” posters bearing photos of the lost cover a Greenwich Village pizzeria. (Photography by David Turnley)
Part of proceeds from the book are going to…the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. I was very moved in talking to David Handschuh…he was underneath one of towers when it fell [and] escaped with his life but was traumatized and prior to 9/11, at Columbine, had seen others experience trauma. [He] started working with the Dart Center to help journalists in this situation. So I decided to give some of the profits of the book to that agency. I’m told that part of the funds will be earmarked for work in New Orleans with some journalists down there. However they use it is fine by me. They’re better at that than I am.
After taking this picture on 9/11 in Brooklyn, the photographer found it upsettingly tranquil, and decided not to publish the image widely until four years after the attacks (Photograph © Thomas Hoepker / Magnum Photos). [EDIOTRS NOTE: This image has caused controvery recently after being the subjedt of a New York Times Op-Ed piece by Frank Rich that paints New Yorkers as having quickly moved on soon after the attacks. For more on the controversy, read more at Slate.com.) TGP: We see photographs all the time of people who really need help, in all kinds of different situations. Obviously, there are certain situations where a photographer can’t get involved, but there are other photographs where (without knowing the circumstances) it looks as if the subject needed help, and instead there’s a photograph of how desperately he or she needed help. Is there a tension there, when documenting a terrible situation, between creating a record and rolling up your sleeves and doing what you can in the immediate present to help people? DF: People have to do what they can do. Nurses can nurse. Journalists can help by showing what the situation is. But I’ve been in situations where the photographer and I have helped the subject because you have to do it. Don McCullin and I were in Beirut—Don McCullin is the great war photographer of his time, along with Larry Burrows in his time. We were in Beirut in 1982 during the Israeli invasion. And we were on an apartment landing, the landing of the apartment of a Palestinian poet, who was infirm and in a wheelchair. And snipers were shooting from the cemetery right outside the window and shooting up at the balcony.  American Airlines Flight 11 (at arrow) approaches and penetrates the north tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. This largely unknown triptych, shot from a Brooklyn window, was part of an ongoing Internet art exhibition that displayed “updated” panoramas of downtown Manhattan every four seconds. (Photographs by Wolfgang Staehle, courtesy of the artist).
TGP: Many photographers, on September 11, did their best to get downtown, to where things were happening. And I remember at the time thinking how crazy that was. Now, reflecting on it, I think maybe that’s what’s necessary for a journalist of any kind, whether it be a photojournalist or otherwise. To be the person who wants to get in there, the way that a fireman wants to get in there to do his job, when everyone else is doing their best to get out. DF: Yeah, there’s a guy named Dave Brondolo, he was a printing plant manager, who was an amateur photographer and who has since become a photographer. But, on 9/11, he just got on the subway, went down there, and got unbelievable photographs of the south tower as it fell. He says in the book what you’re saying. Others will flee, photojournalists are drawn to conflict. Some people are wired that way.  Out of the wreckage of the south tower, first responders carry the body of Father Mychal Judge, the FDNY chaplain, to St. Peter’s Church. (Photograph by Shannon Stapleton / Reuters)
TGP: When you set out to write the book, was there anything that, by the time you got to the end, was especially surprising? DF: Yes… what’s changed since 2001. There was no wi-fi that was popular among everybody. Handheld devices had not become a national obsession and a global obsession. Yes, people got information on their handhelds while they were walking down the towers, but you did not see pictures sent instantaneously. In 2001, 80% of the people who got their news used television as their primary source of news. 3% of Americans used the internet as their primary source of news. This is entirely out of whack with how we work in 2006. The technology, in a very short period, has changed. On 9/11, there were no picture phones. They did not exist in 2001. The former editor of Paris match, Alain Genestar…said to me at dinner recently: If 9/11 had happened today, people in the towers would have photographed what was going on in the towers and we would have seen what was going on inside. Now, we can only imagine how horrible it was. [We would have had] what we had with the tsunami, or the London bombings, people who were citizen journalists, concerned citizens with a photographic impulse, would have taken that moment to share their witnessing with outside witnesses through the medium of digital photography and outside transmission.  Citizens flee for their lives as the south tower falls and fills nearby streets with debris. (AP Photo / Suzanne Plunkett)
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