Twenty-five years ago today, the world changed.
It’s strange how time works. September 11, 2001 can feel impossibly far away, and then I look at one of the photographs I made in those days and suddenly I’m back there. I remember the faces, the missing-person posters, the smell in the air, the silence and the noise, and the feeling of walking through a city that was trying to understand what had just happened.
Like so many photographers, I turned to my camera. Not because I understood what I was seeing. I didn’t. Photography was simply the way I knew to be present, to pay attention, and perhaps to make some sense of something that made no sense at all.
In the days and weeks that followed, I kept returning downtown. I photographed Ground Zero and the people around it, but what stays with me most after all these years are the human moments. People searching for someone they loved. Strangers comforting one another. Firefighters and rescue workers carrying on. New Yorkers gathering, grieving, helping, remembering.
Those photographs eventually became my book Empty Sky.
Photography has a strange relationship with time. We photograph something because it is happening now, but we never really know what that photograph will mean later. Twenty-five years later, these images have become something different for me. They carry memories I might otherwise have lost. They bring people back. They remind me how much can change and how much remains.
The interview below takes me back to Ground Zero and to some of those photographs and stories.
I share it today in remembrance of those who were lost, those whose lives were forever changed, and a city I love finding its way through an unimaginable time.
