Living In The Echo Of 9/11

A decade later, measuring our recovery from the historic tragedy

 

By Donald R. Winslow

© 2011 News Photographer magazine

NEW YORK, NY (July 8, 2011) – Each of us remembers where we were on that beautiful September morning when we first heard the news about what was happening in Manhattan. Collectively we turned on televisions, if we weren’t already glued to the screens, and watched the future of our country – and much of the world – change course before our very eyes. I stood in my living room in San Francisco watching as Tower One caved in on itself and in a roaring cloud of smoke and dust simply disappeared beneath the skyline. On the other side of the nation Todd Maisel, of the New York Daily News, who was shooting on West Street, looked up and then ran for cover and his very life as Tower One thundered down on top of him, other photographers, and first responders. He dove into a lobby as debris rained down and the clear blue morning sky turned to black. That he’s alive today is a miracle.

When he could breathe again, Maisel crawled from the rubble to help police and firefighters search for survivors, including fellow photographers David Handschuh (a former NPPA president), Kenny Murray, Tom Monaster, Bolivar Arellano, and Don Halasy. Like them, Aristide Economopoulos and Susan Watts – and so many other journalists – would be left to wrestle with the fact that for some reason they barely escaped the collapse of one or both towers with their lives while so many around them were lost.

This September it will have been 10 years since that incomprehensible morning, one that a decade later still echoes across our world and touches our daily life in so many ways – big and small. And in those 10 years the photojournalists who were witnesses to such immense tragedy on 9/11 have also been witnesses to recovery. To mark the anniversary of 9/11, NPPA and Pace University are sponsoring a special event, a “visual journalism night of remembrance” that is a both a symposium with speakers and a reception for a photography exhibit. “Witness To Tragedy And Recovery” is a free event (but registration is required). It will explore the impact of media images of the 9/11 World Trade Center attack and recovery. The September 8, 2011, program begins at 5:30 p.m. EDT at Pace University and has been planned to welcome the hundreds of journalists from across the world who will converge on New York City for the anniversary.

Maisel (NPPA’s Region 2 chair) says that a panel of photojournalists, videographers, psychologists, and scholars will analyze and discuss the effects and lessons of news images of disasters, both for the public and for ourselves. The discussion will be moderated by Michelle Charlesworth, the WABC-TV News anchor and reporter.

Aaron Brown will be the evening’s keynote speaker. A former CNN News anchor and host of the PBS documentary series Wide Angle, Brown is now the inaugural Walter Cronkite Professor of Journalism at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Each semester he teaches a seminar on the turning points in television news history. On 9/11, Brown was on the air within a half-hour of the first attack, broadcasting from the rooftop of a building in lower Manhattan as the morning unfolded. For his calm and courageous reporting that day Brown was honored with the Edward R. Murrow Award.

The photography exhibition is being curated by the Bolivar Arellano Gallery and will feature photographs and multimedia presentations by more than 30 visual journalists. Opening during the special anniversary evening on September 8, the exhibit will remain on view at the Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts at Pace University through September 24. Pace University is just east of City Hall in downtown Manhattan, at 3 Spruce Street.

For more information and to register to attend, please go online to www.nppa.org/witness.

 

 

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