IMAGE CATALOG — 465 files
On September 11, 2001, and in the days after, I saved images and a few video clips of the attacks and their aftermath into a folder on my computer. I thought these files might someday be a valuable historical record of what it was like to experience 9/11 through the internet. The front page, made twenty-five years later, is an attempt to do justice to that idea; the about page tells the story. This catalog page is an archival resource: every file, as it was first downloaded. The site lives at /wtc/ because that was the folder’s name; it wasn’t called 9/11 yet.
Each file is shown with its original filename and is byte-for-byte identical to the one saved in 2001. The filenames are either the names the files had on the sites they came from or names given to them along the way before they got to me. Some have unusual extensions (.ap, .wtc, .pentagon) or none at all; these are ordinary JPEG images whose .jpg extension was lost somewhere in the technology stack of the day.
Under each image is its file size, pixel dimensions, an MD5 checksum, any caption or photo credit embedded in the file by the wire service that transmitted it, and, when it could be determined, the source. The download link gives the original file. Not every file here appears on the front page. In particular, none of the video clips do.
