The 9/11 photos we will never forget

9/11 After the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center, Kelly Guenther grabbed her camera gear and ran to the Brooklyn Heights Promenade that overlooks the New York Harbor and the skyline of Lower Manhattan.

Then she saw the second plane coming.

It was on her left, flying over the Statue of Liberty and heading right for Manhattan. A sense of dread washed over her.

“I knew what was going to happen: I was going to witness hundreds of people die,” she recalled nearly 20 years later. “I remember thinking, ‘No, no, no!’ Then I took a breath and told myself, ‘Do your job.’ I put the camera to my face, framed the skyline wide in my viewfinder, and I waited for the plane to come into my frame on the left.”

Her photo, seen above, ran on the front pages of newspapers all over the world the next day. Some cropped the photo or used a sequence of two or three images, showing the plane exploding into the South Tower.

“But to me,” she said, “it is the full frame image that tells the story: the perfect blue sky, the classic NYC skyline and a black plane, frozen in time, a second before the world changed.”

These are some of the photos that have come to define that tragic day in 2001, when nearly 3,000 people were killed in terrorist attacks in New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Editor’s note: This gallery contains graphic images. Viewer discretion is advised.

People run as one of the towers of the World Trade Center collapses in New York City. Suzanne Plunkett was on the scene taking photos for the Associated Press.

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“I was only out of the subway a few minutes, trying to negotiate police barriers, when someone shouted ‘The towers are coming down!’ ” she recalled. “Initially I ran, but my photojournalism training kicked in and I turned around to capture this photo.”

Plunkett felt like she was on autopilot as chaos unfolded all around her.

“I remember feeling completely bewildered by what was happening and desperately trying to make sense of it so that I could continue working. … Even though I was in shock, I kept going, knowing that what had just happened needed to be documented.”

Weeks after 9/11, she was sent to Afghanistan to document what the country was like after the fall of the Taliban.

“Those were hopeful days,” she said. “Girls were going to school for the first time. Women were learning to drive. I’m devastated at what has happened in Afghanistan now, and can’t help but feel that people there have been abandoned by the US and its allies.”

White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card whispers into the ear of US President George W. Bush as Bush was visiting an elementary school in Sarasota, Florida, on the morning of September 11.

“America is under attack,” he said.

Bush had already known about the first plane hitting the World Trade Center, Card wrote in 2002. In this photo, taken by Paul J. Richards, he was learning about the second.

“I tried to be succinct in what I told him so that he understood the enormity of the problem,” Card wrote. “He looked up — it was only a matter of seconds, but it seemed like minutes — and I thought that he was outstanding in his ability not to scare either the American people that were paying attention to the cameras or, more importantly, the students that were in the classroom.”

The President excused himself a few minutes later and left the classroom.

A man falls from one of the towers of the World Trade Center. The publication of this photo, taken by Associated Press photographer Richard Drew, was not received well by everyone.

“People have a reaction to this,” Drew said. “A lot of people say, ‘Well, I don’t want to look at that.’ ”

He believes some people react negatively “because they can see themselves in that similar predicament.” It’s thought that upwards of 200 people either fell or jumped to their deaths after the planes hit the towers.

We will never know whether this man jumped or fell. His identity has never been officially confirmed.

Drew saw other bodies land, too.

“I was photographing the building, and an EMT said ‘Oh my gosh, look at that,’ and then we started seeing people coming down,” he said. “And I just instinctively started photographing them as they were falling.”

Women react as they witness the collapse of the World Trade Center’s South Tower, about a half-mile away on Canal Street.

Ángel Franco was covering a politician for The New York Times when the attacks started that morning. He rushed to the scene and parked a few blocks away from the site, where people were watching from afar.

During his career, Franco said, he always looked to photograph history through the eyes of people of color.

“These two ladies were frozen in time, and you could see stuff in the reflection of their glasses,” he said. After the moment had passed, Franco went back to get their names. But they were gone.

He remembers how beautiful the morning was just before tragedy struck.

“I had been in Lower Manhattan for about a half hour covering the attack,” photographer Stan Honda said. “I continued to photograph, but the smoke blocked out the sun and it became like night. I was near an office building, and a police officer was pulling people in to get them out of danger. I went in, and there was a small lobby where a few people were gathered, as confused as I was about what was happening.”

A minute later, Honda saw Borders and snapped a photo. She was 28 at the time, working as a legal assistant at Bank of America in the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

“It’s hard to tell what color her dress or boots are. There is obviously lots of dust in the air,” he said. “The yellow color is from the digital camera being set for daylight or outside light; the indoor light comes across as yellow. In the rush to get out the photos later that day, I didn’t ‘correct’ the color. The color adds to the photo. It has an ominous feeling to it.”

Honda met Borders a year later at her Bayonne, New Jersey, apartment and was relieved she was OK. But she died of stomach cancer in 2015. She was 42 years old.

“How do you go from being healthy to waking up the next day with cancer?” she said in an interview with the Jersey Journal before her death. “I’m saying to myself, ‘Did (the towers’ collapse) ignite cancer cells in me?’”

Thousands of survivors and first responders have been diagnosed with cancers resulting from the terrorist attack, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Reports from the CDC found that the collapse of the towers exposed workers and the general public to a number of known chemical carcinogens.

It was an ironic twist for Lee, who grew up in South Korea in the 1970s.

“The sense of security was a very important issue for my family,” he said. “The very next morning, al Qaeda proved me wrong. September 11 forever changed the way we live.”

“I started choking and couldn’t breathe. I had dust in my eyes, nose and mouth. I pulled up my T-shirt to cover my face. For a moment, I thought we were buried alive. Then I saw car lights blinking and realized where I was.”

Sancetta took the photo from an open parking garage.

“The garage started to fill up, so I ran to the back of the building and then down a metal staircase to the lower level to find some breathable air,” she said. “There was another woman there, crying and trying to reach out to her son. She worked in the building and had gotten out safely. I didn’t realize how frightened I had been until I pulled my phone from my waist pack to try to call her son for her and my hand was shaking nearly uncontrollably.”

“Suddenly (DeFazio) paused on the sidewalk, overcome by grief and worry. … In that moment, total strangers near her on the sidewalk reached out to comfort her. The moment was fleeting. I’m not sure she was even aware of their presence.”

Source: CNN