From the September11 group log
The new book Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) explores the ways in which the countless thousands of still and video images taken on September 11, 2001, and immediately after found their way into the mass media and helped transform how we see the world. Author David Friend (who is also a friend of Fotolog) relates the intimate, often harrowing accounts of scores of men and women who were compelled to document the tragedy unfolding in front of them.
John Labriola, for example, was an amateur photographer who worked as a tech consultant for the Port Authority, in an office on the seventy-first floor of Tower One of the World Trade Center. Halfway through his hourlong evacuation down one of the stairwells, he pulled his small digital camera out of his knapsack and started taking pictures as he and his companions descended—and rescue workers and firemen ascended.
“I saw firewalls falling,” he says. “I saw people burned. We felt the second plane hit, then heard through a news-retrieval pager that the Pentagon had been hit. The firemen’s faces told the tale. They were contemplating the unknown. They looked as if they’d been climbing a mountain. You could see that they were scared, but resolved.”
Of the 110 frames Labriola took, one, of firefighter Mike Kehoe hauling seventy-five pounds of rescue equipment up the darkened stairwell, illuminated for a second by the camera’s tiny flash, was so gripping that it was put on the AP wire and became an instant icon—a document of terror, but an emblem of courage.
Both Labriola and Kehoe’s compelling accounts of how they have struggled to cope with the horrific memories of that day are representative of the kind of personal reportage found throughout the book.
The author also interviews Scott Heiferman (heif), co-founder of Fotolog and Meetup, who that morning took a single photograph of the smoking twin towers, from the roof of his downtown apartment building. Moments later he uploaded it to his personal photoblog, and within a few days he was receiving e-mails “sent to him by total strangers, expressing intense gratitude tinged with conviction and consternation.” This experience, along with his involvement in the profound community feeling that welled up, were two major factors that inspired Heiferman to develop easy, Internet-based ways for people everywhere to share their daily photos online and to come together offline. Within nine months, Fotolog and Meetup were born.
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2 Responses to “The Eyes of 9/11”
grillo @ 2006-10-18 05:34:37 AM says:
spanish please.
The Daily F’log » Blog Archive » Watching the World Change: Update @ 2006-11-09 01:59:15 PM says:
[…] A few weeks ago, we wrote about the new book Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11, and linked to the anonymous image above, from the group log september11 on Fotolog. […]