Photos From the Aftermath of 9/11

admin August 9, 2021 Breaking News Leave a comment 311 Views

This article was published online on August 9, 2021.

Eugene Richards lives in Brooklyn, but was out of the country on September 11, 2001. When he returned to New York City four days later, he has written, he “metamorphosed into a bruise.” He stayed home, convinced that no one needed another photographer surveying the wreckage. But Richards’s wife and collaborator, Janine Altongy, insisted that they go see it. “You can’t avoid history, not when you’re so close to it,” he remembers her saying. Over the course of several months, Richards and Altongy traversed the city, recording scenes of loss from the long aftermath of the attacks. Their 2002 book, Stepping Through the Ashes, is a collection of Richards’s photographs and Altongy’s interviews with survivors, bereaved family members, first responders, and others.

These days, Richards and Altongy almost never go back to Ground Zero. The memorial pools that now mark where the two towers stood, Richards says, are “so far, far away from the experience” of walking the smoke-filled streets that fall. If it were up to him, the site would be simpler, less polished—perhaps just the portions of the buildings’ facades that remained after the attacks. Two decades on, his photos are a stark reminder of a time when those ruins were all that was visible, a time that already feels long past.

Photo of bird flying at edge of skyscraper through dense smoky haze — A bird flies by a building a block away from the World Trade Center. On September 25, the area was still shrouded in thick yellow air.

2 photos: Hand reaching into group of dust-covered souvenirs in shop window; at Ground Zero, silhouette of person with remaining facade of WTC smoldering in background — *Left*: A snow globe covered in dust and debris, for sale near the site of the World Trade Center on September 24. *Right*: The fires at Ground Zero burned for months after the attacks.

Outside the memorial service for the Brooklyn firefighter David Fontana, in October. His body had not yet been found, so mourners carried an empty casket into the church. “I chose to have a coffin because I knew that my son would be able to understand it a little more,” Fontana’s wife, Marian, told Altongy. Later, Fontana’s remains were found and the family held a second funeral.