Djarum
All-Pro
- Location
- Huntsville, AL
- Name
- Jason
13 years later.
Probably *the* most iconic image of my generation.
Probably *the* most iconic image of my generation.
I still can't re-watch or re-live any of it.
It's our generation's Pearl Harbor. No one will forget what they were doing when they heard the news.
Certainly understandable. How close were you?
I'm with John, I don't want to revisit it or play back that awful day again. Hopefully it will buried by the sands of time.
I wrote this photo essay four years ago. Until recently, I had not been able to watch the videos from that day.
http://jpgmag.com/stories/16504
I lived 30 minutes away at the time. I was just in the building a couple of weeks prior. I saw the news in the morning. I saw the smoke in the sky as I drove to a meeting. I saw people at a rest area gathered around TVs, shocked at what they were seeing. My aunt and cousin, a physician and a chemist, volunteered in the weeks after; she to help the responders, he to sift for remains in the rubble. I was very fortunate that I did not lose friends or family that either commuted through the WTC station or lived in nearby Battery Park City. But the death is just one degree away; my mother's friend's daughter, a photography friend's daughter, etc...
Truth be told, they were ugly buildings, thrusting straight out of the ground from an unfriendly concrete plaza and generated wind vortexes that would chill you to the bone on a Winter's day. But, flaws and all, they were ours, and the cornerstone of the city in whose shadow I had grown up in and the city I had grown to love like no other. The Twin Towers were my personal compass. Wherever I was in the city, which was often those days, the Twin Towers would always orient me.
To watch the footage again would just open up this empty hole inside and out would rush the same feelings of profound sadness. I don't want it completely forgotten, but I also don't want it turned into an "event".
I share them now after over a decade being unseen on my hard drive. The site still stirs me.
The following spring, I took the following photo of the light tribute:
As the years go by I like it less. It's too pretty, glamorizing and glorifying a tragedy.
Ultimately, I don't know how to properly remember that day. I have no interest in the museum. I have no interest in the TV specials. It feels too raw, still.
Thank you for sharing.
I'll end this ramble with some photos from 9/11/2011, at the Empty Sky Memorial in Jersey City, not far from where those first two photos were taken. I'm still trying to make sense of it all, and maybe that's my problem…the wanton killing of innocent people just makes no sense.