ABOUT THIS SITE

On September 11, 2001, I was a senior in high school in Nashville, Tennessee. I started the morning in the senior lounge, where I had a few minutes before class. Two classmates were sitting around a radio listening to the news, and when I walked in they told me a plane had hit the World Trade Center. No one knew yet whether it was an accident. It was strange that they were even listening to it; those two should have been listening to Lords of Acid or KMFDM. I must have lingered, because I remember hearing that the second plane had hit before I got to my 8 a.m. class. Then the news took over the day.

After the towers fell, when the scale of it became clear, the school started letting students go home. Anyone could leave, you just had to stop by the director’s office and say so; they didn’t want to lose track of us. One of my best friends, who is Black, took me aside and told me that I should go home for my own safety, and that I should call my mom and tell her to go home from work. I was confused about what he meant. He knew more history than I did. He saw that I looked Middle Eastern more than I did. (Looking back, we were among good people, and there was no real danger.)

I did go home. Most of my classmates did. Living in New York City now, I know people who had much more direct experiences of that day. Mine was mediated. That afternoon, I tuned in to the web — I had a cable modem by then — and entered the maelstrom of images that no one left for days, or weeks. My two main sources were CNN, which felt like the most authoritative news source (however distant that feels now), and a niche video game forum I was a regular on, which had thread after thread about it. Images turned up there after being pulled from news sites and other forums and passed around; that’s how things moved in those days.

I knew we were living through something historic, and I felt — more viscerally than some of my peers did — that the internet, this relatively new medium, was important too. So I started saving the images as they appeared, so that people later could see what we were seeing. I remember feeling that this was serious work.

Then I mostly forgot I had done it. Only recently, on a backup of a very old hard drive, did I come across a folder called wtc and remember. It holds some 450 images and a dozen short video clips: CNN’s photo galleries, wire-service photos, frames grabbed off the TV, a few eyewitness sets that were being emailed around, a couple of newspaper front pages. None of it is mine. The image catalog has every file, with the name and bytes it was saved with, and what could be established about where each one came from.

I know now that my efforts were incomplete and misdirected. I didn’t capture the right things. I wish I had taken screenshots of whole web pages, or videos of the whole computer, browser chrome and all. The images themselves, isolated JPEGs, feel thin. They’re all so familiar now. They don’t give you the context of what it really looked and felt like to experience 9/11 through the internet at that time — which is what I was trying to preserve. (I did save one page: a New York Times op-ed from 9/13. I’m not sure why that one. Maybe it felt significant.)

Facing this folder, saved with such intention so long ago, I wasn’t sure how to bring the images into the world. But I figured that if I didn’t do something now, on the twenty-fifth anniversary, I might never do it. I decided to take a lightly artistic, less archival approach, to make something out of what I did capture. The front page of this site tries to get at a bit of what it looked like on 9/11 and the days after: the onslaught of images, the repetition of images, the way they seemed to take over everything. 9/11 was everywhere. It was on every web page, on every radio station, in every conversation, on everyone’s faces everywhere you looked.

— Andrew