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Nothing shocks me as much about the World
Trade Center footage as a single frame, excerpted in my mind. It
is the image of the South Tower. Its shiny façade is punctured
by the perfect outline of the jetliner in transition from its
natural medium to an explosive end nanoseconds later.
When we first saw it on the Today Show
that Tuesday morning, the hole in the North Tower, surrounded by
flames and smoke, needed an announcer's stunned description to
make me appreciate what I was seeing.
Terrorism as a visual event. So well
orchestrated was the WTC attack that at least nine video cameras
captured different scenes of jetliners striking the buildings.
But it is that eerie outline in the curtain wall of Tower Two
that sticks in my mind.
Racking and replaying the video tapes
thousands of times brings back those awful moments to us as
viewers. But it is the still image that symbolizes the anguish
we have gone through and the determination of us as a country.
That hole in the curtain wall. The fiery
clouds of explosion. The palm tree shape of falling debris as
the towers collapse. The graceful repose of bodies falling
against the backdrop of the towers. Dust covered survivors
peering out of their masks in frightened bewilderment.
As much as Marines planting a flag on Iwo
Jima's Mount Suribachi, the image of firefighters planting our
flag on a 16-acre monochrome mountain of debris has become a
symbol of our determination.
Still images require study to serve as
icons of our despair. The smiling faces of 5,000 loved victims,
each on its own poster held by a questioning survivor.
Other symbolic photos come to mind as
universal symbols. The Arizona lurching in smoke-filled Pearl
Harbor. JFK Jr. saluting his father's casket. The
napalm-scorched Vietnamese girl running naked down a road toward
the camera. The charred head of an Iraqui soldier during Desert
Storm.
As photographers, we each have the power
to capture a moment in time that might endure as a symbol. In
the week following the attack, I cataloged the images of my
summer and in doing so, came across a panorama of New York
Harbor made from the Staten Island Ferry.
There, on a late Thursday afternoon in
July, stand the Twin Towers, packed with office workers, nearly
5,000 of whom would not be alive in less than two months. |