The photographer Gilles Peress, who has chronicled war and its aftershocks all over the world, was at home in Brooklyn on the morning of September 11, 2001, when he got a call from his studio manager, telling him to turn on the TV: a plane had just hit one of the World Trade Center towers. “I looked at it, and it was evident that it was not only a major incident but that it was not an accident; it was an attack,” Peress recalled. He had a contract with The New Yorker, and the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, phoned as Peress was getting ready to head toward the site. “I drove to the Brooklyn Bridge—there was no way to get across by car. I parked the car and walked across against the traffic of people fleeing lower Manhattan. I got to the other side as the second plane was hitting the second tower, and I continued toward the scene. A cop tried to stop me. He said, ‘You’re crazy, you’re going to die,’ and I said, ‘O.K.,’ and I bypassed him. I arrived as the second tower was falling. There were very few people there.” The only people he recalled seeing at first “were a group of about six firemen, who were trying to do the impossible.”
The photos Peress took that day (some of which were published in The New Yorker at the time) convey the sense of 9/11 as what he calls “an inconceivable event,” an unmooring, transitional moment when we “encounter historical systems that are beyond our comprehension or knowledge, that we have a problem placing in a continuum of our experience of history so far.” Firefighters spray water into a mass of rubble so pulverized that no sense can be made of it. Ranks of cars are indiscriminately covered with a coating of gray ash on a street rendered unrecognizable. Medical personnel in hospital scrubs and surgical masks stand around, waiting to help injured survivors, of whom there are none in sight. Everywhere, clouds of dun-colored smoke, shot through with the yellow light of a clear September day, swathe the ruins, creating a new and foreboding sort of weather. In a cataclysmic scene where you expect to see dead bodies and wounded people, there are none in these pictures. As the critic Susie Linfield has written about 9/11 photography, “There is little evidence of the dead, because most were burnt into dust: Ground Zero was a mass grave but one without many bodies.” The destruction of the Twin Towers was an epochal tragedy for which photographers, like Peress, had to find a different semiotics of loss.