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 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, ho were trying to do the impossible.”