the World Trade Center
morning view from Brooklyn
September 1984
The World Trade Center
This page contains videos and an excerpt from a much larger essay with several poems and many photographs entitled In Memoriam: The World Trade Center which appears in MarcPerspective, a separate collection of essays spanning more than 40 years.
Background
Many times I captured the World Trade Center in black-and-white and color film in the decades before its destruction. When I took portraits of the Twin Towers from a distance, close-up or even from the observation deck, I tried to capture their positive elements as engineering marvels constructed in anticipation of a productive future.
The Twin Towers were endlessly fascinating for a photographer who sees lighting, angles, reflections and the way a subject changes throughout the day and night or in weather conditions such as fog. I also wanted to show people who didn't live in New York a place that was distinctively New York, a unique, impressive part of the city. I knew other cities were in awe of New York's famous places and its ability to literally think in terms no other city could conceive, then follow up on its audacious visions. The amazing was routine here and had been since New York's beginnings.
My images of the World Trade Center are now historic — a record of the towers as they stood until September 11, 2001, an achingly beautiful day of clear blue skies, shattered by unfathomable, irrational horror beyond anything imaginable. It was a day I consider to be the most awful I have ever witnessed. It will always be deeply emotional and unforgettable.
But many people were directly impacted far more than I was, through the loss of a parent, child, sibling, relative, colleague or worker at the Center including countless firefighters. My sense of devastation can never come close to theirs and their stories supersede anything I have felt or could write.
It is crucial to recognize that the true loss was of people, not buildings. The latter can always be replaced. The city's physical renewal of itself, while setting aside space for remembrance, can be one of the answers along the path of recovery. But it was and remains the people, and only the people, who matter.
The annual public reliving of the attacks, the extreme loss of human life and the immediate aftermath as well as long-term effects and illnesses are an unavoidable part of the World Trade Center and the Memorial ceremonies each year. The honoring of those who were lost is also a fresh reopening of the worst possible public as well as private family wounds, requiring a healing all over again.
Nevertheless, it profoundly affected me, too, despite my being solely a witness from the street about two and a half miles away in Chelsea. The first plane flew directly over my head. It startled me since I knew it was not where any plane was supposed to be, as I waited for the light to change and cross the street before arriving at and entering the building where I worked. The rest of that violent day and the collective anguish and pain of New Yorkers as well as tears that came from my own eyes as I returned to the street and watched the unthinkable, would be imprinted in my memory forever.
Absorbing Trauma
One of the ways I dealt with the shock and trauma, beyond talking about it with others, was to write my thoughts and match my images of the Towers before their end with essays and poems. I wrote for months, even years afterward as I, along with the rest of the city, endured post-traumatic stress. It surfaced unexpectedly in my dreams. The sudden sound of thunder in a passing storm at night, when I was sleeping, woke me up in instantaneous anxiety and fueled a recollection of the sounds of that day which became a small but heartbreaking poem. I also wrote a letter describing what I saw to family members and friends who did not live in New York.
In addition to my photographs, some of which I turned into a retrospective video more than a dozen years later (see below), I resurrected a short video I took with my VHS camcorder just a few years before the attacks. It does not match the quality of today's cameras but it was the technology of those times for home movies. The video now has an entirely different context and I have yet to accurately describe the haunting sadness I feel, in contrast to my original awe, when I view it from today's perspective.
Despite having my camera with me, I didn't take a single photograph on September 11, 2001. I had already photographed the life of the World Trade Center but I deliberately chose not to photograph its death. I wrote the reasons for my decision in another essay entitled "Why I Don't Photograph Violence and Tragedy".
Below is an edited excerpt from the introduction to my original essay and poems about the World Trade Center which appears on another website.
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(taken with black and white infrared film)
October 1990
In Memoriam: The World Trade Center
The first time I ever saw it in August 1973, the World Trade Center was still under construction, although nearly complete. It was my first visit to New York City and I was learning the layout, trying to see as many of Manhattan’s important structures as I could.
I had an extremely strong interest in architecture and design and I was already heavily involved in photography. The World Trade Center fascinated me even at such an early stage in its life and naturally I took photos of it. Although I was from Chicago, which had plenty of tall buildings, I knew that a complex of this breadth and scope existed nowhere else.
The World Trade Center was the biggest, boldest set of structures in the most important and famous financial district in the world — precisely why it was chosen for attacks — but when it was constructed, it was also an awesome and optimistic leap into the future.
The World Trade Center held records that no other development came close to equaling. More than just the 110-story Twin Towers, the Center was actually an enormous collection of seven buildings (including a hotel and a six-level basement) on 16 acres with 13.4 million square feet (by comparison, the Sears Tower in Chicago has 4.5 million square feet). About 50,000 people worked there and more than 200,000 visited each day.
Anchors of the City
After I moved to New York in August 1978, I still marveled at the Center but I became familiar with it on more practical levels. It was never far away from where I worked or lived, easily accessible by subway and a frequent, casual walk from my job. During the day, the Twin Towers were straight down the street and always visible. The World Trade Center also had a shopping mall, and it was a major transportation center with many subway lines leading into and through it. I would go to my bank’s ATMs in the underground concourse and in later years I would sit on the vast World Trade Center plaza and gaze up at the towers while making cell phone calls.
Countless times I saw those landmarks rising in the sky from different places in the city and the metropolitan area. They appeared as the symbols of the destination called Manhattan on my bike rides from Brooklyn, becoming an ever-closer goal as I crossed one of the bridges over the East River. They were sentinels guarding the city, even more than the Statue of Liberty, when they were approached from the harbor. They were two big brothers that looked down dominantly and reassuringly on the rest of their family (all their little brother buildings and even us human inhabitants) from their lofty, all-seeing tops. They guided you from any spot and major streets such as Fifth Avenue or Broadway seemed to lead straight to them. They were easily recognized from as far away as Jamaica Bay, Newark or the cliffs along the New Jersey Palisades. They were the only man-made structures that could be viewed from Bear Mountain in the Hudson Valley. They magically reached up to greet you when seen at the tip of Lower Manhattan on approaches to Kennedy or LaGuardia airports. Even at night their sparkling lights allowed us to gauge our directions and find our way home after an evening of plays, concerts, movies or clubs.
Absence
Much has been written and debated about the World Trade Center itself. Here is my view: I miss those buildings. They were an expression of economic achievement. They were representatives of America and of mankind. They were also just majestic when you stood directly beneath them and let your eye follow their stainless steel skins into infinity — you had to see them from exactly that perspective to know what I am talking about. Many who have offered opinions about the World Trade Center may not have actually experienced those qualities.
Office buildings and tall buildings will always be with us and will continue to be built around the world. But there was nothing like the World Trade Center.
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The World Trade Center
videotape by Marc P. Anderson
1998
The World Trade Center
photographs by Marc P. Anderson
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