Documenting the World Trade Center Attacks | David Friend | Talks at Google

And I'd like to welcome you all to another authors at Google Talk. A little under six years ago, about an hour and 20 minutes before this photo was taken, I was four blocks away, also looking up. Moments before, I just heard the cartoon sound of an airplane flying into a skyscraper. It was a sound I was unable to process, just as it was impossible to grasp from the street the. The scale of what had just happened. Later, other images would fill in the mental gaps. Images like this one. This photograph doesn't smell, but looking at it brings the smell back to me. Right now, it's not a frightening photograph, but seeing it recalls my fear on that day. Still, now, six years later, looking at more than a handful of these photographs together evokes such a visceral response in me that I have to choke back tears. So it takes quite a lot of bravery to explore these photographs, the stories behind them, their meaning, and their impact. Fortunately, there are few people better qualified to do that than David Friend. As a correspondent, he's covered conflicts in Afghanistan, Lebanon and elsewhere. He's been Life magazine's director of photography and curated exhibitions of photography at the United nations, the International center of Photography, the Newseum, and elsewhere. A winner of Emmy and Peabody awards for his CBS documentary 9 11, which has aired in more than 140 countries. I'm delighted to welcome David Friend to Google to talk about his book Watching the World. The Stories behind the images of 9 11. David Friend.

Thank you, Alexander. As you tell your brief account of what you were experiencing that day. I'm finding, as I go around the country, speaking about the book. The book came out last year from Farrar Strauss, and then this week or last week came out from Picador in paperback, which you now have. I'm finding that people, wherever I go, when I tell them the subtitle of the book, talk about their own experiences, every one of us connected somehow to this historic event. I think it's true that our lives and our individual stories always connect, but in this particular case, it was particularly acute and particularly germane that we were part of a larger narrative. For the first time ever, history came to our shores in the form of a war where we were attacked on U.S. soil for the first time since World War II. And so each of us somehow was connected with this and feels connected with this. And people can go on for 20 minutes. And I always sit and I listen because every story is riveting and, you know, now six years later, but each of us feels this connection and I think sort of a metaphysical or spiritual way. This is true about so many of our stories and how our individual lives really matter, but this is particularly true that day. It's particularly true because we shared not only a historic event, but we shared a set of images that grounded us. We all saw the same pictures that day. And even though the accounts have changed and even though the Internet has bred this sort of revisionist history of why it happened and what happened, the pictures for years will be there to tell us the sequence and dread of the day in this particular pattern. And we have those pictures that we share in our collective unconscious. It wasn't always this way. And you'll see in the book a sense of the history of photography, but a sense of the history of. Of the digital transmission of photography just in that short period in the 1990s through now, through now, of how we came to see images so immediately in our lives 34 years ago. The question was, where were you when you heard the news? And for some of the older. A few of the older people in this room, there aren't too many of us with gray hair, but a couple. You know, that meant President Kennedy was shot in Dallas. The equivalent, really, of when I was quite young, people said they were, you know, I was listening on the radio, or a teacher came into the classroom, or, you know, we heard it on the intercom, or someone had telephoned. The verb was heard. Where were you when you heard the news? Now, in the age of Google, in the age of CNN and YouTube. YouTube didn't exist in 2001. The question is, where were you that day? Where were you when you saw it? People got it on their pagers, they heard it online, they saw it online, or they got the information by a cell phone or on television. In the case of the Kennedy assassination In November of 63, an intrepid reporter named Richard Stolle from Life magazine at the time went and procured for. I think it was no money. I think it was a deal that was made, and I'm not sure exactly how much it ended up being, but it ended up being donated to the National Archive, I believe, procured the rights for Life magazine of 20, 22 seconds of film. It wasn't videotape at that time. It was a man named Abraham Zapruder who really had the first. Was the first citizen journalist, if you will. He was standing at the parade route in Dallas and he took 22 seconds of film of the President being assassinated. It just so happened. And for questions of taste, it did not run as a video or did not run As a film. It first ran three or four days later in still photographs in Life magazine. Now that was instantaneous. In 1963, to see these images taken that no one really knew about and suddenly they're appearing in still format on the pages of magazine in three days was unheard of. And then we all watched on television at that stage when four days after that, Jack Ruby shot the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald. So what happened in 2001, it's equivalent. We all saw the same event as it unfolded in real time. 2.5 billion people are estimated to have watched it that day. Television or on the Internet. That's a third of the human race. The most witnessed event in the history of mankind. Most witnessed news event in the history of mankind. And those of us who couldn't see it and didn't understand it or watched on television would then go to the Internet and look at it again. We had to see it until we could process it and understand it. It was that baffling. Just to give an idea of how things have changed since from 2001 to 2007, in these six years on, 9, 11, 80% of us chose TV as our primary news source in this country. Only 3% went to the Internet in 2001. Blackberries and trios and there were not really WI fi. This was not a national addiction yet. And people didn't have access in that way that they do now. Blogs were getting started, but there weren't really blogs with video files embedded in them. And there weren't, you know, citizen journalism really came of age that day. There were no cell phones that were camera capable. And my friend Alain Genistar, who was until recently the editor of Paris Match, said to me one night recently that were 9, 11 to have occurred today. The attacks would be have. People would have had their cell phones in the towers and would have been able to photograph what was going on inside and then put those images over the Internet. The Internet lines were working. The telephone lines weren't working as well. So we would have witnessed what was going on inside as well. For better or for worse. So what were we seeing on September 11th? We were watching the same picture story. It was a cityscape that was under siege. Sort of pulled back image because it was very dangerous to go down there. Though many journalists did. Though many people brought their cameras out. Thousands of people brought their cameras out, camcorders as well as still. It was really the fixed cameras, the stationary cameras, we call them, the beauty cams that are fixed, that the television stations have, were how we tended to see this. We had talking heads on television or on the Internet, and we had this pullback image that felt in effect, like a still photograph. And we watched for 102 minutes and from the first strike to the instance of the second tower falling. And this is exactly what Al Qaeda, exactly what Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, that who conceived this idea wanted to happen. Terrorism, by its very definition, demands to be seen and wants frightened eyes to see it and wishes that media fan the fury. So that's what was happening, and that's what bin Laden understood. He knew the whole world would be watching. So my book addresses in very human terms and sometimes in technological terms, what has happened. So just to give you a quick sense of the technology and then I'll tell you a couple stories and want to show you some images as well. How did this transformation occur? In the 1990s, there were two real breakthroughs. The first was the rapid transmission of digital pictures, digital news pictures, this transition from traditional film to digital film, and then the ability through the Internet to quickly transmit and post those pictures. On 9 11, about. 200 frames were serviced by the Associated Press. That's seven times the number of news pictures in a typical breaking news event. And another friend of mine at Paris Match said, we closed our special edition on 911 in nine hours. And the lesson I would tell photographers is, keep your Leicas in the closet. We need news immediately, urgently to understand that day. And this transformation that had occurred in the 1990s came into play just in time 2001, for us to be able to see. This second big breakthrough was satellite news gathering. The Gulf War in 1991 had proved that the whole world sort of needed instantaneous news. Just a quote in the book that says that. I gathered from Time magazine that during the Gulf War, as the US Retaliated against Saddam Hussein for having invaded Kuwait, Time magazine reported that the CIA director, that CIA Director William Webster, received word via intelligence satellite that an Iraqi Scud missile had been launched toward Israel. He would tell National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, turn on CNN to see where it lands. The network had become, in Times words, quote, the common frame of reference for the world's power elite. End of that year, the man who was named Times man of the Year was not Saddam Hussein, was not George Herbert Walker Bush. The men who had fought the war. The Times man of the Year that year Person of the year that year was Ted Turner. The man who brought us the pictures of the war, he was deemed more important. And of course, he became co chairman or vice chairman of Time itself, of Time Warner. And this sort of, at that stage in 1991 was a precursor to what would happen. We would need to see news, we would need to see images, and we need to see it now. And we began this 24, 7 news era that we now live in because of fiber optic cables snaking under the ocean floors that were planted through the 1990s because of satellites that were circling 23,000 miles above the planet during this period, we became sort of connected in this matrix. And then there was a penetration into households of television sets and of the, obviously the Internet, which completed the cycle. So these two new technologies occurred, plus a few changes. And I'll just quickly read a section from the book before I want to just get on then get some, show you some images. The Internet also played a key, key role here on September 11th. The World Wide Web was a logical destination for those seeking urgent information, especially in New York where phone lines were jammed and antenna born TV service was spotty. Quote, this is from Editor and publisher magazine. CNN.com saw 162 million page views on the day of the attacks, observed the Poynter Institute's Steve Outing, who noted that typical traffic was in the 14 million range. See how much has changed. Stuart Allen in the book journalism after September 11 pointed out that between September 11 and 16, the online news category grew by 80% compared to the previous week in the U.S. then you see people then shifting their news habits as the technology then changed after 2001 to going straight for the Internet. There's a great piece in the current Vanity Fair which came out yesterday, which is on newsstands by Michael Wolf, who set up this news site called Newser. And Michael really talks about the idea of the death of news, that really we don't need news. We get so much information coming from so many different areas now that it's almost this filter of this sort of. I guess I've seen the word in this week's Economist about Google, the cloud. We have this cloud of news. And in this same sort of way we don't need immediately to see the way to get a newspaper, to get a talking head to tell us we sort of have this. According to this piece by Michael, this ability to get the news in any news isn't news anymore. It's sort of an amorphous entity. But what also happened that day and immediately in 2001 was this idea that the Internet was a primary hub for connecting different spokes of the 911 community that first week, the web was an electronic philosopher's stone and ultimately pliable medium for coordinating relief and emergency response, reaching out to the message boards or chat rooms, posting company emergency bulletins and obituaries, linking passenger families to data from airline manifests, raising relief funds and outlining terms of compensation among government agencies, corporations and insurance companies. Second, over time the Internet proved unmatched as a receptacle for posting and archiving stores of information, much of it visual. I go on in the book to talk about so many of the areas where people put visual information about 9 11. There's a show I urge people to see which is reviewed in the New York Times today, but opens I believe next week called Here is New York up at the New York Historical Society, the most comprehensive photo archive. 1500 images I think will be there, but I think they have 8,000 images by average citizens from that day and they'll be shown along with artifacts at the New York Historical Society. But so many of these collections of pictures and collections of memorials, personal memorials, were put online so that people were able to go in with a, with a, armed with a sort of few pictures and a web address and a prayer, able to remember their loved ones. And many of these sites are still there. Second, thirdly, there was a sense that blogs were conflated with real urgency that day and have remained so since. While blogs certainly exist before then, the idea of their importance that day was pivotal. And one of the first person who began blogging the next morning was a guy named Jeff Jarvis, who I'm sure a lot of you know of Jeff's work. He is a teacher here at City University, but he's also his buzz machine as his, his website. He encouraged me to have a website and I now you can go to watchingtheworldchange.com and for those of you who came late and their books are gone, you can go there and just order a book as well. I use this, I have my own book blog where I'm talking about and posting, talking about issues related to 911 issues related to photography. And readers also send me their pictures and send me their recollections of the day. And finally the web really you had the birth of citizen journalism. It had existed before then, but it really came of age on you saw the really according to Dan Gilmore, who is a journalist who monitors sort of the grassroots importance of aspects of new and old media, said that day via emails, mailing lists, chat groups, personal web journals, all non standard news sources, we received valuable context that the major American media Couldn't or wouldn't provide. We were witnessing on the Internet the future of news. The book is not all about technology. It's about stories of people. It's about people like Gene Coleman, who lives up in Connecticut, a realtor who saw a photograph of the 103rd floor of People hanging out the windows and saw both of her sons. So she believes in the windows because they both worked at East Speed, a division of Canter Fitzgerald. And through that picture, I tracked her down, and it took her three years to sort of come to terms with the photograph. And she actually asked me if I could get her in touch with the photographer because she wanted to see if there were any off frames that maybe she could get more information about, about what affected her sons, the picture to her. I said, why do you want that information? And she said, you know, it wasn't obviously, for her closure. It was a very horrific image to see and to get a sense of the scale of the death, but also the personal death of both of her sons. But she said it was important to me to see it, to know that Scott and Keith did not just go into oblivion by seeing them. Somehow she had a sense of. That they were entities, that this is what happened. In fact, this picture was taken 20 minutes before the tower collapsed. This is important to her because by the time I interviewed her, which was three years after the attacks, she'd only gotten one rib from one of her sons. She had nothing else except this unspeakably intense and horrific picture. It's also. The book also talks about so many other tales of people who use pictures to help them. There was a woman named Laura Greenstone who counseled people who'd lost loved ones. She's out in New Jersey, and she was able. There was a mother who was continually. Who had lost her, a wife who lost her husband, whose kids were very young at the time, and she was worried they wouldn't have a memory of their father. And she would come to every session crying. Laura worked with her through art therapy, and she took. She had her. The woman. Her life was so disjointed that the patient, actually, she came in and she said, what do I do with all these pictures? She had pictures in boxes that were mixed up. So over the course of a year, the two of them together, ordered the pictures in sequence, got his life, the husband's life, and the children and the family's life together and in order. And then she had the patient go and select two shirts of her husband's shirts from the closet. Have the kids pick their favorite shirt. And she bound two photo albums with the husband's shirt on the outside to have a tactile sense of his presence. And was able, after the course of a year, to feel happiness when she went to her sessions, to feel that there was a gathering together of a life. And so this sort of. This use of images for her really mattered. So in any case, the. We all have different connections to pictures of that day. And the book sort of uses that as a way to tell the tale of a single week. The images we share. Let me show you, if I can get this to work properly. Some pictures. Some of these are a little rough. So this first sequence, there's no sound on this, but There we go, was shot by Jules Naudet. Jules Naudet was shooting a documentary downtown on a firehouse. Happened to be there when there, a gas leak in the street, looked up, heard this sound. They were all hearing this sound and got the very first plane as it went into the North Tower. Jules was not the only person who shot this moment. And this became the beginning of a documentary we did together for CBS that Robert De Niro narrated, which was called 9 11. And it was really the story of a firehouse. And the book describes what these fellows did, but the heroism of that day we all witness as well. But Jules wasn't the only one. There was also a Czech tourist, a Czech New Yorker whose brother was a tourist, and they were videotaping at that moment. And then there was a German artist who lives in New York named Wolfgang Stahl, who got the first plane going in as well. He had set up this crazy, wonderful Internet art project. This picture has not been seen much at all because Wolfgang has not wanted to exploit. Appeared for the first time. One of the first appearances was in this book, in a couple of art journals as well, and in France. But Wolfgang had set up this art project where pictures would be taken every four seconds from a window in Brooklyn and then transmitted over the Internet to a gallery. And he started doing this on September 8th. And every four seconds, the picture would refresh and it would be shown 22ft by 9ft as a mural on the side of this art gallery on the west side. I think it's like a block and a half from here. It's the Postmaster's Gallery, which I think is 20th, maybe it's 26, so maybe it's a few blocks from here. But people would go and they'd see this sort of wonderful Zen, like New York, where a tree would move and the boat would move and a cloud would move and the light would move. And there was sort of this sense that in real time, the world was a work of art. But suddenly history trumped this vision because Wolfgang realized, and you can see from the digital printout and digital output in the corner, that the first plane is coming in and then impacts four seconds later and then impacts four seconds after that. So even before the event was an event, people were photographing it, which says a lot about the life, the world we live in now, of how everything is. I mean, when we can go on Google, obviously, and see all of our homes, we are in a world where the camera matters. Patricia McDonough happened to be there that day. She was in about five blocks away and remembered the morning in 1993 when she had been there and the first towers were attacked. And she woke up, heard this boom, said, God, this sounds weird. You know, she sort of had that deja Vu from 1993 and then heard the sirens and got out of bed. And she happened to have her camera, she's a professional photographer, happened to get her camera, and she had happened to have a fisheye lens on it. And Patricia's picture was just stunning to me when I saw it. You get the sense of an individual life and an individual world imploding, in effect, because of that lens. And then she decided not. She decided to look. She looked out her window, saw photographers going down there, photojournalists saw the towers falling. Nobody needs another photographer. She was great at CPR and had been trained in Red Cross to help others. So she went out and walked down 14 flights of stairs and went into an ambulance and pitched in for a week. Many of us had to just photograph ourselves, you know, this woman, Isabelle Daser, who's an architect, thought she was also an amateur pilot in her spare time. And so she thought someone just lost control of a small plane. So she wanted to. A lot of us didn't know how to react, didn't know what was happening. She wanted a picture taken of her with her eight months pregnant at the time. And she ended up giving birth to a daughter a month later. She named Amelia after Amelia Earhart, one of her idols. And then there were all different levels of pictures at the time. This was taken the next day from space. There was, in fact, an astronaut, the only American off the face of the planet that day in the International Space Station, who photographed the events from space as well. I write a lot about him in the book. But by the time the second plane attacked, it was almost like elbow to elbow photo op. There were so many people who came down there, average citizens and others. Many people came down to help. Many people fled. But photographers were sort of drawn to the event. Rob Howard was one of them who took it with this image. It wasn't like he knew a plane was coming in. There would be no way to anticipate something moving that fast. He just happened to lean out and caught this image on a medium format camera, as did Lyle Orko, who did the same. He went in with a very. His camera was so high resolution that he was able to. The people examining the pyrotechnics and looking at how the buildings themselves were ended up collapsing and looking at the structural damage, examined his pictures to get a sense of how the fires progressed. Evan Fairbanks was there, caught the same moment on videotape. He was doing a teleconference with the Archbishop of Wales, who happened to be just down there at the church, Trinity Church. This is the COVID of the book. Patrick Witte figured, you know, I want to. He had a flash moment. How do I shoot my own shock? He didn't want to focus on the buildings. He focused on the people. And he stood up on a curb so he could get a little bit of an angle looking down on reactions. And just as he did, the second tower, the first tower fell, which was the south tower. Jerry Spagnoli, it just so happened, was doing at the time, was doing a project using an old daguerreotype technology. It was from, you know, from the eight from 1839. He was taking pictures of New York landmarks. So he brought to his roof a daguerreotype plate and an old view camera and photographed what really to him gives a sense of the picture to him shows that life goes on. Not just that this is a horrible event. You look at the picture and you think Civil War, or you think the fire, the earthquake in 1906 or in San Francisco, or you think it sort of compresses the precedents, as Jerry says within the photograph, so that you get a sense that, yes, horrific things do happen, but we heal over time. And so you get this sense of the history within a single picture. On the total other end of the spectrum, John Labriola photographed my Kehoe, who was walking up the stairs. Mike, you know, you look at this picture and you think, there's a dead man, you know, how is he going to his fate? So wide eyed, you know, he's carrying 75 pounds of gear up the tower north of the north Tower. In fact, Mike got a Mayday order and ran down 22 flights and survived. He was saved by one minute with six others and lived and became something of a hero because of this picture. Dave Brandolo, the photographer, John Labriola, who took that picture, who happened to be working for the Port Authority, was so taken with it. I mean, John photographed 120, I think, images as he walked down, as he went out in the street. Amazing pictures. He's just an amateur photographer who just really did that every day, would take pictures of his surroundings. Just a wonderful photographer, wonderful man. And he went. He figured he'd seen so much, seen so many people falling from the buildings. He'd seen so much horror that he decided to go pray. And he went into Trinity Church. And at that moment he went in and he met Dave Brandolo. Dave happened to rush down. He ran a printing plant. And Dave has since become a professional photographer. But he caught the moment the tower collapsed. First tower. So many people took pictures that day. Kelly Price photographed this reporter who happened to be reporting for thestreet.com he was doing Wall Street. He was really a columnist on Wall street dealing about, you know, writing about finance. But he became a war reporter, as did the photographer. Kelly was just walking and bought one of those little disposable cameras from a bodega and fired off four frames before they both ran. And both were saved from the engulfing clouds of dust. My friend Jules similarly survived the collapse of the first tower and then survived the collapse of the second tower and decided, I'll just leave my camera on and started running. He felt a body jump on top of him as he ducked under this van. And as the tower was falling and all the dust and debris came down, he was saved by being under this van. But he felt this body breathing on him. And once the smoke cleared, he realized the person on top of him was the fire chief who was in that very first sequence you saw, who jumped on him to save his life and saved his life twice. Two times that day. And Jewel is now Jule and his brother Gideon, who French filmmakers. They're both American citizens now, are just terrific. They're doing a big show this Christmas for CBS on. They've gone out and interviewed the 15 top leaders of all the religions in the world with top 15. I mean, they're just fascinating guys. And CBS is going to air that as a special Christmas week. Someone who was not. As there were two people who perished that day, two photographers and six people working in television who were on in the hundreds 110th and 104th floors, I believe it was of the World Trade Center. Two of them were photographers who perished, one was Bill Biggert. Here's his equipment. His widow I interviewed for the book talks a lot about Bill's experiences and the fact that he self assigned he just sort of heard that the attacks were happening, he heard that buildings were under attack and he just went down there as so many photographers did. Alex Webb was on his rooftop and just did this picture. I asked Alex about this and he said, look, you look at this picture and you think, well, life goes on. Which is something Jerry Spagnoli said. But it's also the sense of what sort of world are we bringing our kids? This picture had a lot of controversy. This is a picture taken by Thomas Hopkins, wasn't published for four years. The first time it appeared in America was in the book and on my website and Frank Rich wrote a couple of columns about it and there was some back and forth. The notion when you look at this is you feel possibly that these five people are somehow relating to this and just have moved on, which is what they thesis of Frank's column was. They took exception to that and wrote columns for I believe Salon or Slate. The two people on the right saying how could you presume? Or the photographer presumed to know what I was feeling. They were very upset and were talking about the experience. And the woman who's leaning back and whose body language conveys possibly something lax was anything but. She, her grandmother helped the architect build the World Trade center, so. Or was involved in the plans for the building. So we bring like as we do with music, we bring our own association to pictures. And so Thomas, when he shot this fake picture, when he looked at it on a light table, decided not to run it, not to publish it. He just felt it was the wrong message to send. Possibly it meant when we looked at it there was too much complacency. It wasn't the sort of, it wasn't a proper 911 picture. Obviously over the passage of time he changed his mind and I'm glad he did because it's a very chilling, telling picture. I'll go through this really quickly and we can talk a bit. Just a sense of how many different ways pictures affected us. That week we track the. The hijackers threw their images on cameras at the airports, their visa application pictures. The Bush administration, President Bush, as any Democratic or Republican president would have done, went there and was photographed there. And Luke Sant, the photo critic said, you know, it's understandable that he went there. We Wanted to see our representative, the President of the United States, walking around on something down there, you know, solidarity. Unfortunately, the Bush administration then misused this picture in my estimation and used it in campaigns for four years. Three years later, during the 2004 election, where this picture was quite often used for the election campaign and was used at the convention, which of course was held In New York, 15 subway stops north of the attacks, Bin Laden did the same. Bin Laden doesn't exist as a public figure. He exists only as his picture or his audio tape, we know. And every so often he's releasing these, this propaganda, as he did at that, at that point. Very sophisticated. And we use that image ourselves as a culture. This was very early on, tompain.com produced this. I remember seeing in the New York Times, I want you to invade Iraq. It's just the exact thing that anti war activists early on in 2002 and three were saying. And then images, this picture by Stan Honda on the COVID of Fortune sort of represented the collapse of the financial services industry at that point. And then this picture, which I devote a whole chapter to Thomas Franklin's picture of heroism, but also the backstory behind this picture. So I would love to entertain any questions or people's reactions or people's own connection with the day, if there's anything you'd like to ask. And I also encourage people to go on watchintheworldchange.com as well. I put a little thing up this morning about Google, about my certain things, because Google is really involved with photography lately. Yes, thank you.

David, you said quite a bit earlier that you think people need to see news images, need to see, need to be part of the cloud of information. I know that I went home and I was drunk for four days. I didn't watch the tv. I was oblivious and I'm glad I was. Do you think we really need that?

Well, I think for two reasons we needed. One is that people had to know it was such an urgent time. There were so many people who lost friends who wanted. They needed information to process their own mixed emotions. So some people obviously, as you did, wanted to forget in that short period. But in the. More so for me, there were immediate needs for information on so many different levels. But in the longer term, we have to remember of all people who, I do really politically have some issues with, Rudy Giuliani. But Rudy Giuliani created a wonderful. Was involved in a wonderful documentary called In Memoriam in which he says, you know, we really need to forget. We really need to know exactly how bad it was, because if we don't, we just lose sight of, you know, if everything is just flags and heroes, we forget how we become complacent. And so a lot of the pictures represent that, and I know they're very tough to see, but I think we sugarcoat too much in our society now and need to know the real truths. If we had seen coffins coming back from Iraq, I think we might have soldiers from Iraq, I think we might have gotten to the stage we're at now in 2007, maybe in 2004, 2005, and maybe saved that many lives and that many Iraqi lives. So I think we can't always soft pedal and think about questions of taste. I think we do that too often. And that's, I think what photojournalism is meant to do is to shake us up and to document and chronicle any other questions.

The one picture that wasn't published until recently of the folks sitting around with the bikes talking about the towers, I'm wondering what other examples of self editing similar to that that you might have run across in putting the book together.

Well, it's interesting, self editing. A lot of photographers don't. They shoot, they give it to editors and the editors edit. They don't want people to see things. A friend of mine, Marianne Golan, who's the director of photography of Time magazine, said, you know, there really weren't that many horrific pictures because the devastation was so total that people were, you know, it wasn't like you had a whole front of a telephone, the keypad, you just had a little piece of it, you know, so there weren't body parts that often. There wasn't all that much immediately to see. And it was very difficult to get to those areas. People were kept out immediately by, for their own safety, right in the vicinity of the towers, by police down there and military folks that came quickly down there. So there wasn't necessarily that much that wasn't seen those first couple days that was censored, if you will. And she told me that she went to Europe once and she had, you know, people were angry. Like, of course you guys censored it. You didn't show all this. But Time magazine did not. And I know the New York Times did not. They were showing pictures of people plummeting. But I know a lot of the networks did not, and possibly rightly so, that the core horror was so terrifying that we didn't, on top of it, need to see people falling from the towers. Whereas in Europe, this went on repeatedly over and over and over. We not only saw the planes going in, but they saw that, but they saw people falling from the towers as well. And that was. If there's a sense of censorship, that's something that certain networks ran once and not again or not at all. There was decisions made not to gratuitously show yet another aspect of it. Maybe wrongly so, maybe that's something that should have been. You know, you can argue on both sides, but beyond that, I don't. I don't know of other images that immediately come to mind that. You know, I know a lot of photographers who just still haven't shown their pictures. They say, david, I'll show them to you at some point, but people just stashed it away. They saw so much through their lenses. They just still can't come to grips with it or face the fact that they did or want to exploit it, if you will. Well, thank you for coming today and I really appreciate your interest. And if you have any recollections yourself or any reactions, I encourage you just to write me at the. Or email me at the website and I'll be happy to post them and I'll be happy to sign books afterwards, if you like as well. Thanks.