Special Report - The Pictures

New York Diary: The Pictures
September 17, 2001
by John Bloom

NEW YORK (UPI) -- For some reason I never developed the pictures.

I had squeezed off 16 snapshots of the World Trade Center from the 42nd floor of my building. I was only half aware of doing it, and then, after this became the most photographed disaster in the history of the media, I thought, "What's the point?" Time and Newsweek and CNN had hundreds of better ones. There were closeup videos of both crashes. There were miles of videotape of every aspect of the attack, the explosions, the crumpling of both buildings, the panic. The photographic images were so familiar that they had become iconic, forever etched into everyone's mind.

But the truth was, I was also afraid. I couldn't explain why I didn't want to see the pictures or why I remained emotionally rattled six days later. It wasn't like I had seen anything everyone else hadn't also seen. People in foreign countries probably had better views on television than the one from four blocks away. I hadn't been injured by shrapnel or lost a friend. I hadn't even needed to run as I made my way to safe ground. And then I developed the pictures.

Fourteen of the pictures were lies. They were full of fire and shattered glass and molten metal and a robin's-egg sky so clear that at any other time you would have called it perfect. But they didn't show the sparkling, glinting particles in the air, fluttering down over the city like a miniature snow globe. They didn't show the ethereally bright orange of the flames. They didn't capture the strange unmoving stillness of the buildings-- both planes had vanished--and the spiritual dislocation that occurs when all points of reference disappear. They didn't show the unutterable beauty.

I'd been afraid to use the word "beauty" when I filed my first account three hours after the disaster, but it's actually the most frightening detail of all. I couldn't stop watching even after the horror set in. In fact, there are pictures I don't remember taking. I thought I had fled the building after the second crash, but there they are, close-ups, long shots, perfectly framed, both buildings progressively turning into giant chimneys.

The remaining two pictures caused me to break down again, for the first time since last Tuesday. In one a man is standing on what I think is the 86th floor--I counted down from Windows on the World--and his silhouette is bold against the horrid red gash erupting behind him. In the next picture he's already made his leap, and his form is another ten or twelve floors down, again outlined against the brilliant whiteness of the tower.

I never saw this man. He exists for me only in the picture. All weekend I thought of him, wondered who he was, what he must have been thinking, how I could have looked directly at him through a viewfinder and never known he was there. It's difficult to explain why the knowledge that I own a photograph of his final moment disturbs me more than looking at much more vivid pictures in the New York Post.

I've had a chance to speak to other people in the neighborhood, and the ones who watched it all happen are somehow different from the ones who watched videotape of it. I suppose there's some "grief counselor" or psychiatrist who could tell me why that's true, but there are people with real grief who need those people. One thing I know is that I can't show these pictures to anyone. There have been enough pictures.

I've returned every night to Ground Zero, and as the police roadblocks have become closer--parts of the city are slowly being opened up to traffic--there have been more and more tourists, taking their own pictures. They buy four-dollar American flags and "America At War" T-shirts from the Chinatown vendors, and their cameras are constantly snapping, even when they're nowhere near the crash site. They even take pictures of the "Missing" photos that families have pasted on every subway entrance and phone booth in lower Manhattan. The tourists think the pictures will make it more real, somehow preserve it, somehow connect them to it. It's a paradox that those who watched on TV want a closer connection, and those who watched up close want a more distant one.

I have these nightmares. They're not nightmares about what I saw, but about what I might yet see. If someday my television screen shows images of a burning civilian building in Kabul, or Peshawar, or the Beqaa Valley, it will be the realization of what I already see, and if anyone celebrates the sight, I'll be angry. And yet I have no right to be angry, because something in my own mind saw this as a photo opportunity, and even saw beauty in it. I'm as guilty as everyone else. Our cameras are making us into monsters.

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