He remembers: “I randomly opened the door to one of the offices, walked in, and got the picture. Jonathan Torgovnik returned the next morning to take this photo from the fifth-floor window of the neighbouring 1 Liberty Plaza, which was also in danger of falling. Building - now more famously known as 30 Rock, and took a well-framed photo of the disaster before 30 Rock itself was evacuated. The couplet clearly underlined the cyclical nature of violence, destruction, and fanaticism, and perhaps it was also fitting that one of the most famous photos from 9/11 was also taken by a man who once covered the D-Day landings - Marty Lederhandler of AP.Ī veteran photographer of 65 years, Lederhandler had seen plenty of fires and explosions his advanced age prevented him from heading out to the WTC site, so the 84-year old photographer went to the Rainbow Room on the G.E. Auden wrote, “ How Everything Turns Away/Quite Leisurely from the disaster.“īut it was a different poem by Auden that was frequently quoted in the days following 9/11: the unmentionable odour of death/offends the September night, he wrote about the month the Second World War began. The photo recalls Bruegel’s The Fall of Icarus, where a peasant nonchalantly plowed as the titular boy plunges to his death, and the poem it inspired: W. They’re just American.” This assessment was met with objections from many people, including the photographer himself and the people in the photo. Hoepker’s photo aren’t necessarily callous. Accordingly, Frank Rich opened the debate by saying the photograph is a prescient symbol of indifference and amnesia: “This is a country that likes to move on, and fast. On the first glance, the photo espoused the quintessentially Seidfeldian - and by extension, New Yorkian - values of nihilism. In Williamsburg, he captured the above pastoral scene, but decided to hold back the photo, feeling that it was “ambiguous and confusing.” When finally published on 9/11’s fifth anniversary, the calm scene seemingly challenged the conventional wisdom that “nothing in America will ever be the same again”. Magnum’s Thomas Hoepker crossed from Manhattan into Queens and then Brooklyn to get closer to the scene.
(continued from yesterday some may find some images that follow disturbing) 9/11 was painful - but so was the harried decade that followed it.