With dozens of other professional photojournalists, Bill Biggart was there when the towers collapsed and lost his life. His film cameras were destroyed, but the flash card in his Canon D30 survived.
“As you scroll through 150 pictures or so, you are not only just looking at a guy on the street making deliberate pictures, but they are framed a certain way, tells us something about the photographer as well.
“As you get there, the unique angle of looking straight up at the buildings, you never saw that from anybody else. As you go through the timestamps, the cloud of dust comes towards you. You just see this massive cloud framed with fire trucks and police cars, and firemen and policemen.
“He is going closer and closer, as you go through, you see peoples reaction, and you see how people are handling all this… every one of Bill’s pictures are about people and how they are reacting to this story. We need to remind ourselves this story isn’t about buildings, but about how people are effected by the loss of these structures.
“So we track through to the end, and we see the second to the last frame. He is moving forward, he is walking down West street, and he is moving towards the pedestrian overpass connecting the World Trade Center and the World Financial Center. Bill is getting closer and closer, and you see more firemen and fire trucks and the second to the last frame you see policemen, and fire trucks under the overpass.
“And then you see the last frame that nobody else will ever have. You see the honeycomb pieces of the first building… and we see half of the hotel that was destroyed as well. After the second building fell, the hotel, the Marriott I think, was gone. You see it cut in half from what fell from the first building and it is time stamped 10:28 and 24 seconds. Basically that time stamp is the end, because at 10:30 is when the second building came down.”
But for the grace of fate, that could easily have been me.
It is worth remembering that modern terrorism moved into urban centers precisely to ensure the presence of cameras and media to broadcast the horror to the widest possible audience.
It is entirely about creating spectacle.