A photographer who shot the towers fall on 9/11 struggles to unravel the meaning of resilience

For twenty-five years I’ve waited for an epiphany that hasn’t come. I’m still trying to digest the unimaginable.

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I was a staff photographer for the New York Daily News on September 11, 2001. It was primary day in New York City. Mayor Rudy Giuliani was term-limited, and the next mayor would have big shoes to fill.

I had just finished photographing Democratic candidate Mark Green voting and was scheduled to cover Giuliani voting at 11am. I grabbed a coffee while transmitting my photos to the paper when my beeper went off: “Plane hit World Trade. Go.”

As the police scanner crackled with activity, it didn’t really add up when they said an American Airlines plane had hit the tower. I rode the tail of a firetruck all the way down the FDR, fending off any vehicle angling to take my place on that bumper.

Then the words came over the radio:

“A second plane just hit the second tower.”

And everything changed.

The horror I photographed that day and in the weeks and months that followed was filled with a grief for which I still don’t have language. And I felt my role as a photojournalist had never mattered more. Everybody has a camera now, but back then, I was their eyeballs. The public saw what I saw.

As the years passed by, the anniversaries grew heavier: first, fifth, tenth. But alongside the sorrow, there was also hope and strength.

For the fifth anniversary, I documented Lower Manhattan’s recovery. I contemplated the assignment, trying to find the shape of it.

How do you photograph resilience?

The scars of 9/11 were still visible on the landscape, but the people of that community were defiantly rebuilding their lives. Those pictures became a work we called “Milestones to Recovery,” a photographic chronicle told through the small, private rituals of the everyday.

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Life in post-9/11 New York had become once again, like life everywhere: children turned cartwheels, newlyweds rejoiced, deals were brokered, dinner was served, babies were born.

In a city where the sidewalks are full of people who’ve either made their name or come hoping to, the real miracle downtown was the quiet return of the ordinary.

“Milestones to Recovery” was published by the Daily News as a special magazine and the project grew into an outdoor photo exhibition in Battery Park sponsored by the Alliance for Downtown New York.

Twenty-five years later there is still no epiphany. No insight. No closure about 9/11.

It will always be a wound that doesn’t close.

But perhaps that isn’t the point.

What we do in the aftermath of the crisis – how we rebuild, how we carry on – may ultimately be what defines us.

Susan Watts photographed 9/11 for the Daily News, where she was a photographer for 25 years.

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