February 15, 2010
Editorial
9/11 From Above
In the days and weeks immediately after Sept. 11, there was, in many people, a deep hunger to see and see again what happened as the World Trade Center towers burned and then fell, a hunger fed by disbelief and shock. But as the years have passed, 9/11 has resolved itself into a collection of core images — photos, impressions, memories — whether you were in Manhattan that day or not.
This is the condensation that time nearly always accomplishes. So it comes as a surprise — just what kind will vary from person to person — to see the photographs taken that morning by Greg Semendinger, then a New York police detective, from a Police Department helicopter, the only aircraft allowed over Manhattan once the crisis had begun.
The dozen photos — obtained by ABC News from the National Institute of Standards and Technology — were shot from several different angles: over the Hudson, crossing Manhattan north of the towers, looking back toward Brooklyn, and up the island. They capture an aerial glimpse of a burning tower and then the immense plumes of smoke, ash and dust that engulf the sudden vacancy where the trade center stood.
Because they’re shot from on high, they capture with startling clarity both the voluminousness of the pale cloud that swallowed Lower Manhattan and the sharpness of its edges, a reminder of the beauty of the morning out of which so much tragedy so quickly roiled.
It is surprising to see these photographs now in part because we should have seen them sooner. It took a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain them from the national standards institute, which provided the official, technical analysis of why the towers fell. These photos also remind us of how important it is to keep enlarging our sense of what happened on 9/11, to keep opening it to history.
They will be part of what we hope will be an enormous and publicly accessible archive at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.
From: The New York Times
February 10, 2010
Aerial Photos of Trade Center on 9/11 Released
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, in the NYT
Newly released aerial photographs of the World Trade Center terror attack capture the towers’ collapse, from just after the first fiery plane strike to the dust clouds that spread over Lower Manhattan and New York harbor.
The images were taken from a police helicopter carrying the only photographer allowed in the air space near the towers on Sept. 11, 2001. They were obtained by ABC News after it filed a Freedom of Information Act request last year with the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which investigated the towers’ collapse.
The still images are “a phenomenal body of work” that show a new, wide-angle look at the towers’ collapse and the gray dust clouds that shrouded the city afterward, said Jan Seidler Ramirez, the chief curator of the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, which is compiling a digital archive of attack coverage. The photos are “absolutely core to understanding the visual phenomena of what was happening,” Ms. Ramirez said.
The images of the dust clouds rising as high as some downtown skyscrapers “are some of the most exceptional images in the world, I think, of this event,” she said.
ABC said the photographs were among 2,779 pictures on 9 CDs the Institute of Standards gave the network. Some of the photographs had not been released before, it said.
The network posted 12 photos this week on its Web site, all taken by Greg Semendinger, a former detective with the New York Police Department’s Aviation Unit, who was first in the air in a search for survivors on the rooftop. He said he and his pilot watched the second plane hit the south tower from the helicopter.
“We didn’t find one single person. It was surreal,” he told The Associated Press on Wednesday. “There was no sound. No sound whatsoever but the noise of the radio and the helicopter. I just kept taking pictures.”
View photos here
No comments:
Post a Comment