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| Edward Keating |
What stood out was the mass of these buildings."
Keating, 45, has been a staff photographer for the New York Times for 10 years.
I was supposed to be going to Lisbon that Tuesday night for five days of vacation. I had left some things that I needed for the trip at my home in upstate New York, and I needed to get an early start that morning, and I had overslept. I was supposed to be up at 7:30, and I got up at 9, and I was cursing myself. I ran out and got in my car, turned on my radio, and heard Don Imus talking about a plane hitting the World Trade Center. I thought it was a joke, but there was something in the tone of his voice, and I kept listening, and then I found out it was real. I called the office and I told them I was cancelling my trip. If I had not overslept, I would have been off the island and would have missed the first two days of the story, so there was certainly some luck there for me.
I don't think there has been a news story like this before. The closest I've ever come to this is maybe the situation in Kosovo a couple of years ago, but this story was different. This happened in my town. It involved Americans. New Yorkers. It hit very close to the heart.
 Personally, well, thank God no one in my family was hurt. I don't have any immediate friends, at least that I am aware of so far, that were killed. Emotionally it took me a few days for it to really sink in -- that we had in fact been, as our newspaper put it, attacked, and that this was in fact a first real strike in a real war that might go on for quite some time. This whole question of good versus evil coming up in my lifetime again was pretty shocking. We were going to have this showdown the same way my father's generation had it against the Nazis.
Well, the first two days, I was turned away over and over again and was unable to get access to Ground Zero. The third day went by and I had some good pictures, but a lot of other people had a lot of good pictures. I said [to myself], I have to get something that they just have to publish, because [the story is] that important. And that night I went down and I spent a few hours plotting and maneuvering and slipping and sliding, and when I got past all the various checkpoints and got to that site, I was just...it was just a huge moment. You know, I wanted to cover this story, and the idea of really missing it...I don't think I would have been able to handle that.
What stood out for me was just the sheer magnitude, the volume, the mass of these buildings. The piles at the bottom are certainly enormous. Yet they didn't seem to account for the volume you would associate with the amount of mass for these enormous buildings. What made this different, I guess, from any other real situation I've seen, the startling thing about this visually, was all the dust. We call it dust, and God knows what it is, but basically it covered everything. It covered the ground, and there was dust and papers, and it would get into apartments. It would get into the stores, and it would cover bottles. There were still these giant spikes, a couple of the remaining walls.
We [journalists] try not to be political, we try not to be opinionated, we try not to take sides, although you know in the end it's impossible not to have a position on [stories]. But I guess I've never really covered a story where the outcome of it has such implications. The outcome of this is going to have a profound effect on my life and my kids' lives and on their kids' lives. There is no other story [that I've covered] where that's been true. I am on [America's] side, but as a journalist I just want to present the information.
It's a different place journalistically than I've ever been. And you know, it's strange now, and it might get stranger and stranger as time goes on.
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