A crowd of stunned New Yorkers witness the collapse of the South Tower of the World Trade Center at 9:59am on September 11, 2001. In 2013 I used Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to identify the people in this photograph. You can read more about all …

A crowd of stunned New Yorkers witness the collapse of the South Tower of the World Trade Center at 9:59am on September 11, 2001. In 2013 I used Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to identify the people in this photograph. You can read more about all that at TIME, Mashable, The Atlantic, The New York Daily News, and PBS.

 

MY OWN EYES ARE NOT ENOUGH

 

9/11 Photos by Patrick Witty

 

*A version of this story appeared in a special edition of DoubleTake magazine

A scream awakened me. My first thoughts were that someone had fallen off the roof. I lived on the top floor of a five-story walk-up on the Lower East Side of New York City, about a mile from the World Trade Center.

As I was putting on my clothes to see what happened, the phone rang. It was a friend, Cary Conover, yelling out of breath, into the phone, “Get on the roof, a plane hit the World Trade Center.”

I grabbed my camera and ran up to the roof. Black smoke and fire was billowing out of the towers. A second plane had just struck, indicating that this was no accident. I shot one color photograph before heading downtown.

I was about two blocks away from the towers, looking upwards, watching what seemed to be paper, debris, falling to the ground. There were loud bangs, like car crashes. It was the sound of bodies hitting the ground.

I couldn’t bear to look at the towers any longer, I turned and saw a crowd of shocked faces, looking upwards.

As I started to take a photo, I heard a loud crack behind me and instantly turned to face the thunder of a 110-story building crumbling to the ground. Then screaming, running, and chaos.

The cloud approached. It seemed a mile high and a mile wide, and was traveling northward. I ceased to think about photography at this point, and focused on survival. Along with everyone else, I ran.

After emerging from the cloud, I walked towards downtown again. I photographed one woman, who had a huge smile. She stared right into my lens and said, “Can I get an eight-by-ten glossy?”

The following days in New York I will never forget. Below Fourteenth Street, there was no traffic. The streets were completely silent. There were no planes in the air and no cars in the street. For three days it could have been Sunday morning.

 
 
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