Posted on 10/12/2024 8:00:56 PM PDT by Red Badger
In 2001, digital cameras were a rare commodity. They were expensive, bulky and captured images that were inferior to the organic look of film. After you downloaded and edited those whopping 3.1 megapixel images, you had very few options of where you could publish them online. Remember when Shutterfly and Snapfish were a thing?
Contrast that to today where you have people shooting magazine covers on cell phones and uploading over 500,000 images to Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and Facebook every minute. We don’t hear about national tragedies on the news anymore, we read about them in our Twitter and Facebook feeds. Seconds after they happen.
When the events of 9/11 took place there were thousands of photographs taken by professional photographers and members of the press. These images were shown on the news and published in magazines and newspapers all across the country. Yet, few of these featured photographs were taken by everyday people.
I wanted to set about curating a selection of photographs that most of you haven’t seen. Photographs captured by everyday people. Thanks to the internet these individuals have been able to publish their photos to Flickr, but most of them have less than a thousand, or even less than a hundred views. As I searched for these images it was like I was witnessing history again, but from an angle that no one had ever been shown. I decided to share these photographs with all of you.
For the images that were captured on a digital camera, I’ve made a note of the model of the camera. All images are hosted on the account of the person that owns the photographs, none of them were taken down and re-hosted.
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PHOTOGRAPHS AND CAPTIONS AT LINK....................
(Excerpt) Read more at medium.com ...
I remember it like it was yesterday.
And I remember the reaction in my community - I lived in a very ‘mixed’ (in terms of race, ethnicity, citizenship, etc.) apartment complex. Almost everyone had an American flag hanging from their windows or balconies, and many had them on their cars. Someone brought in a big flag and hung it on the wall of the (very liberal) institution where I worked - that flag was still there when I left many years later.
Today, it seems like that was a different U.S., and a different world.
“This image struck me on a deep emotion level. In the midst of the chaos and destruction there were still people willing to show their selflessness and cover the remains of the victims.”
That picture is unreal. Its the first picture of remains on the street i’ve ever seen.
it was
There’s a documentary about one of the ‘jumpers’ who is eventually identified as a worker in the restaurant at the WTC.
In one of the documentaries, you can hear the bodies of the jumpers strike above the firemen who are gathering to begin the trek up the stairs - most of whom would not survive.
The actor James Woods was on a plane with some of the hijackers who were doing a ‘test run.’ Woods informed authorities about what he thought was suspicious activity but obviously nothing was done in time.
The creator of FAMILY GUY was hungover that morning and missed being on one of the flights because of it.
The flight to Los Angeles was occupied by television (Frazier tv series creator) David Angell who had bought a place back on the east coast and was retiring.
Lots of stories of near misses that morning. Michael Jackson was supposedly scheduled to be in one of the buildings (not certain which floor).
Had the attack happened an hour later the casualty rare would have been much higher.
Every once in a while, there is something good on television. I have mentioned several times, the HBO limited series Chernobyl. The 6 episode “9/11: One Day In America” is a fantastic miniseries. While it will still make your blood boil, it has absolutely incredible, uplifting aspects.
It’s been coming up on 1/4 of a Century and the photos and memories still make my heart burn with a rage hotter than One Thousand Suns.
How ANYONE could still practice a religion of SO MUCH evil, is beyond me, but I know what dwells within their souls.
Not me, however, as I was in emergency planning and response, I stayed at work in an eerie and quiet building with a handful of my counterparts.
Downtown was deserted, not an aircraft in the sky.
Meetings, updates, contingency plans. This would be my responsibility for the next several years.
Bookmark
This Guy knew one man who, by the time of the first plane hitting the South Tower, had left the building, after arriving at work, to go vote in the NYC primary election. So the election helped him survive.
There were several firemen just standing outside as we passed and we got to talking to them for a couple of minutes. They told us that their station lost 5 guys that day. I'll never forget it.
My mother worked about a few blocks away from the wtc. She always took the subway that ran under the towers to work.
That morning, the first plane hit before her train pulled in its usual stop. When she emerged from the station, she said there was a lot of smoke and debris. She walked to her place of employment. It was evacuated. I don’t know if it was evacuated before or after her arrival.
She obviously couldn’t go back to where she came from, the subway. So, she made the trek to the upper east side of Manhattan where her brother lived. I dont know how far she got when the buildings collapsed. She stayed at her brothers place until it was safe to come back home which wasn’t for days.
We didn’t learn this until years later, but one of the people who was trapped up in the tower that got hit by the second plane was our former landlord.
Evidently, after the first plane hit the other building, an announcement came over the PA system telling them to stay where they are. Some ignored the announcement and left. My landlord obeyed the message. It was his biggest mistake. He was on the phone with his family before and after the plane hit his building. His last words on earth to his family was to scream “OH GOD!!!” the second the building began to collapse from under him. His remains weren’t found for months.
He was a lousy, mean landlord. We lived in a 2 family apartment house. We lived in the second floor apartment and he and his wife lived below us in the first floor apartment.
He used to invade our privacy, barging in without notice and without so much as a knock on the door, he’d withhold and open our mail, he wouldn’t make repairs or improvements to our apartment, and worst of all, he froze us every fall and winter by giving us little to no heat. We were forced to complain to the housing authorities about him not making necessary repairs as well as for freezing us. For reporting them, after the authorities went away, his wife would angrily ring our doorbell for the longest time.
Mother said it was karma what happened to him.
I’m in NY, 40 minutes from Manhattan, and was on the phone that morning through the late afternoon trying to track down relatives and friends (all but one came home) and i’m familiar with stories you talk about.
“In one of the documentaries, you can hear the bodies of the jumpers strike above the firemen who are gathering to begin the trek up the stairs - most of whom would not survive.”
I believe that was the documentary done by the two French brothers who were actually in NYC to document the life of a probey (1st year fireman) and just happened to be with an FD company checking a manhole cover and they filmed the 1st plane hitting.
I bring that up because later in the day on 9-11, they (French documentary guys) speak with the probey who mentions one of the veteran FDNY guys said to him, “there were body parts all over the place.”
I had heard several reports of this before yet never saw any of it until this picture.
On 9/11, and for 11 yeas afterwards, I worked about 100 yards from NSA’s first high-rise building off Fort Meade, just just a freeway overpass away from the campus.
I had just arrived at work when someone told me about the first plane. I thought it was just another lost aircraft, like in 1942(?)
When the second aircraft hit, everyone immediately said terrorism. When the 3rd aircraft hit the Pentagon, the NSA director ordered an immediate evacuation by all NSA contractors in the region. It took me 3 hours to get home, just 22 miles away.
There were more than 25,000 NSA employees on Fort Meade at that time.
As I recall the Palestinians (or rather, the West Bank Arab squatters) were celebrating on 9/11.
I used to be an inveterate movie-goer. There were times I went to up to three movies a week. But I hadn’t gone for a while, and when the movie “Flight 93” came out, I went to see it with a few people.
The theater was about 70-80% full.
The movie was so powerful that when it ended, and the lights came on, you could hear a pin drop.
Nobody moved.
I believe at that point, there were maybe a hundred people in there (I could be off) but I know for a fact that there were not just a hundred people in stunned silence. It wasn’t stunned silence.
I realized that every single person in that room was reliving, in an extremely private and invisible way, a time in their lives that was so significant to them, and that absolute river of thought was completely different for each of those people.
Outwardly, if I had looked back at the people behind me in that movie theater to see the looks on their faces, I expected to see something obvious like grief or anger on their faces. I didn’t look back. But I feel certain that if I had, the the look frozen on their faces would have probably been the last one they had as the movie ended, stuck there like a kabuki mask, fixed in place.
But underneath whatever mask they wore, there was a river of remembered events rushing under the skin of each of those people.
I think that, because that was exactly how I perceived myself in that moment, and there seemed something universal about it, I just felt that everyone was responding the same as I did.
When the movie ended, and the lights came up, not being still “inside” the movie, I remembered that day.
I remembered that I just could not watch the television as other people were doing. I work in a hospital, and patients, doctors, nurses, technologists, and custodial personnel were all clustered around televisions in the waiting rooms. Everyone was uniformly staring fixedly up at those CRT televisions. There were two, or maybe three of those bulky televisions on a large supporting structure in the middle of our waiting room, mounted near the overhead and facing outwards in a small circle so no matter where you were seated in the waiting room, you could see a screen.
When I walked in, there was a crowd of people gathered in a circle around this bank of televisions, all looking upwards at them. In my mind, it is much the opposite of what we have now. Back then, we all look up at a screen of images. Now, we look down at an object flashing images in our hands. I find that contrast interesting.
Anyway, it broke my heart. I couldn’t watch it. I went immediately back to my office in a permanent trailer, and got back to work. I was emailing people, and I did a group email expressing how I felt in my heart that this was a turning point in all of our lives. I am someone who keeps everything including emails, so I had all of those communications from that day. And then, around 2014, we went from using Outlook to using Gmail and they deleted my whole archive.
I was communicating with people via email when that happened alone in my office with only the light from the window. I didn’t even want the overhead lights on, even though it was a workday.
Then I heard the unmistakeable sound of military jet engines, and a lot of them. I ran outside, and saw a flight of maybe seven to twelve F-15’s going over at perhaps 500 feet. Very low, and very slow.
They were in single file, a long string of them, going in to land. As they flew directly over our heads, they rolled slightly from side to side, their landing gear looking awkward in an odd way. As if they shouldn’t have been maneuvering normally like that at speeds and altitudes that low.
Personally, I have spent a good amount of time around military aircraft, and it was very odd to me. I wondered why they were doing that as they lined up to land, I had never seen anything quite like that in four years on a carrier.
As I was taking this all in, a woman nearby blurted out “Look what Bush has done!”
I knew and generally liked this older woman, but that made me boil and I said hotly to her “Why don’t you keep that shit to yourself?”
When I went back into the trailer, my phone rang, and it was the Chair of my department who asked me politely if I could come over to her office. It is not something one takes as anything less than an order. That physician was an ex-Army Colonel who had made a career in the Medical Corps involved near the top in the digitiazation of medical images, she was an Indian-American, and was a woman. She was extremely aggressive, very demanding, and I thought she was often rude and occasionally abusive to people.
I once heard her profanely threaten, as she opened the door to our small meeting room and threatened to shoot a someone in the knees with a shotgun because she thought he had gone back on his word. My boss, who well knew how to handle her, said with a completely calm and straight face “Doctor, you can’t go around threatening to shoot people in the knees.”
When he said this, her face brightened in an odd way and she said “Oh. I can’t?”
I heard, sometime after she left us (via an anonymously mailed newspaper clipping to me) that she had been sued by another doctor who said she threatened his life. In court, the article said that the guy suing her maintained that my former boss said: “I have access to a flamethrower, have had training in the Army, and I know how to use it.”
She was not a person to be trifled with. When she called, she expected action. But it was a little unusual, and it was a long walk to her office, all the way at the other side of our facility. I wondered what it could be about.
When I walked in, she had an awful look on her face, and I could tell she was extremely upset, but not in the manner of being upset that I was well used to see. Her eyes were a bit red and puffy, and I had never seen her like that. She asked me some perfunctory question, then asked me to sit down.
She said she had been trying to call the Pentagon all day to check on someone she was close to who worked there, but nothing was getting through. She reached into her desk drawer and said “I want you to have these” as she pulled out a small silver object. She handed it to me, and I saw it was the insignia of a Bird Colonel. I think she liked me because I had served in the military and I think she felt comfortable around me. They will talk about her at my hospital as long as any institutional memory of her remains. When I go, a large piece of that will go with me.
Then, we began to hear rumors. We heard the husband of another of my former bosses had been on one of the planes, American Airlines Flight 11. That hit close to home. I had gone out to dinners with him and my boss, socialized, went to Christmas Parties and such, and the last time I had seen him was years before 9/11, when I had stayed at my boss’s place near a lake. He and I had stayed up late on the deck near the water, drinking beers and shooting the breeze.
I relate all this for a reason.
Everything I wrote above was a stream of thought that began hitting me as soon as the screen went black on that movie, “Flight 93”. I have zero doubt that every patron in that theater had a rush of thoughts just like mine, and that video reel of thoughts began in everyone’s minds right then. I think people in that crowd were completely immersed inside their own minds.
My story began with I saw an email, and walked into the patient waiting room...”
Everyone has theirs. For example, this was how someone else’s story began: “I was at Jury Duty in a large metropolitan area and after it happened we all got sent home...” and so on.
In that now briliantly lighted theater as soon as the “Flight 93” movie had ended, I heard a lone low voice say “F**k Them.” We knew exactly how he felt.
Amen
I ran a legal news wire business in Foley Square for 20+ years...
In NYC there was life before 911, and there was what happened after.
A friend with a GCN radio show knew that WTC was my professional environs & called to ask if I could be interviewed live that afternoon.
I agreed, because I felt it was my responsibility, but when I went on the air I actually realized how mentally, emotionally & spiritually shaken I was, in fact I was in a state of shock...
I did make one prediction though: I announced that America *probably* wouldn’t learn *anything* positive from the attack(s).
I really wish I had been proven wrong, but it seems like every bad political/.gov/.mil/cultural problem we had prior to 911 was magnified many-fold in response.
These days I try not to think of 911 anymore, never been able to watch any video connected to the “event”, it was just to horrific...
I could go into great detail concerning many aspects of the “tragedy”, but why bother?
Instead of pulling together, taking out the trash, returning to our “spiritual” roots, we became more egoistically self-centered, proud & entitled, when what was needed was an awakening of humility & soul searching from sea-to-shining-sea.
Never thought I’d live to see *absolute* tyranny in America like has devolved over the last 23 years...
For those with children you love, my condolences.
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