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| Allan Tannenbaum |
"I said to myself, 'So this is how the world ends.'"
Freelance photographer Allan Tannenbaum has been covering world events for 20 years. His apartment is six blocks north of the World Trade Center.
I was at home the day of the attack. My wife, Deborah, and I heard a plane coming in very low. We looked at each other, and I said, "He is too low...he is too low." We knew there was going to be a crash. We heard the explosion and looked out the back window. We saw a fireball on the World Trade Center, and my wife started crying, "It's terrorism.... It's terrorism!" I went to grab my cameras.
I did a shot out of the back window, but that was useless, so I ran into the street with my gear.
My block is on Duane Street between Greenwich and Hudson [Streets]. I ran to the closest corner, which was Greenwich, from which I have always had a clear view of the towers. I could see the point of impact, the outline of a plane, flames coming out. I shot some wide shots and some tele shots. I was shooting both digital and chromes. I couldn't see it at the time, but when you look at the photographs you can see that there are people in the windows [of the towers].
As shocking as this was, you would never in a million years imagine there would be a second plane and that the buildings would come down. I knew the next thing I had to do was to get as close as possible, so I went over to West Broadway and worked my way downtown. I was only two blocks north of the burning tower. [My goal was] to shoot the point of impact from that location.
Then I heard, for maybe two seconds, the sound of a jet, and I looked up, and there was this explosion above our heads. I remember some guy in the street going, "It's a bomb! It's a bomb!" There was a fireball, and I raised my camera to take some picture. But then [I] realized I had better get out of the way, and I ducked behind a building.
 People in my vicinity were hit by debris. I photographed some of [them], then realized I better get up to the plaza area, so I walked another block east to Church Street, and then south. I saw lots of people's shoes in the street, which is what you see when there is a panic -- people leave their shoes [as they run away].
I got to the corner of Vesey and Church Streets, which was a good angle on the towers. [It is the] northeast corner of the [World Trade Center] complex. You could see the towers burning. [On] the South Tower, the fire was lower because of [where] the second plane had entered. There were wounded in the street -- people who had been cut by glass, people who had been injured by debris. The emergency services were arriving. People were running out of the building in droves with a look of terror on their faces.
Amazingly, my sister came out of one of the buildings -- the South Tower. She worked in there. Of course I had been thinking about her through all this. She had called my home [from her office] after the first impact to ask what had happened, but I was already gone. My wife told her a plane had crashed into the tower, and she said, "I'm getting out of here." She had run down 92 floors before she saw me in the street, and was very relieved.
Having covered the terrorist bombing [in 1993], I knew there was the danger of falling glass and other debris. I moved up Fulton Street, alongside the Millenium hotel to Broadway and continued to photograph people coming out.
I can't remember if I saw it happen, but I heard it happen -- the South Tower started to come down. This was a terrifying noise, and I was really worried that part of it was going to fall on me. I put my back to the side of an office building near Broadway and listened to the sound. Then, like an end-of-the-world movie, giant billows of smoke came shooting out of the side streets on the north and the south of me. I started to run, but all of a sudden I was enveloped in this cloud of ash, and my mouth and nose were filled with ash. There was this black whirlwind, and I stopped running because I didn't want to bump into something or fall down. I put my bandanna over my nose and mouth so I could breathe, and I prayed. I said to myself, "So this is how the world ends."
Then it became deathly quiet, and it was just pitch black. I realized I hadn't been hit by anything; I could breathe if I breathed shallowly through my handkerchief. After what seemed like interminable minutes, this cloud started to clear. I was covered with ash. I dusted myself off and went back to work.
I walked back down the street to the plaza, and it was a scene I had never seen in my life. The smaller World Trade Center buildings tilted, their windows blown out, steel beams in the street, layers of ash and papers, people walking, walking, ambulances on fire.
I took pictures there, then again the police were coming in, and I thought, "I better get out of here." I moved back to where I was before, and the second tower started to come down. I photographed people running away from this black cloud of smoke, and I ducked into a Duane Reade pharmacy. I went down to the basement, and there were other journalists there, police, EMT workers, and it was pitch black outside again. This was an opportunity to get some paper towels, clean off my cameras, clean off my face, and get some eyewash. I was able to make a phone call from the basement of the Duane Reade pharmacy and let Deborah know I was still okay. When [the darkness] started to lift I decided to go to another area, so I went to West Street on the other side of the complex.
I relive this sequence of events over and over again -- the sound of the jet coming in, knowing there was going to be a crash, seeing the fireball. It gives me chills to think how many ordinary people were killed and how these families have been damaged by what's happened.
I feel bad about [photographer] Bill Biggart, who was [killed in the building collapse]. I met Bill in the Middle East, [covering] the Intifada in the 1980s. He was brave. At that time he had a big beard, and the Palestinians in one town thought that he was Jewish. He received a lot of hostility from them. The next day he was clean-shaven. He was hardworking, he was dedicated, and he was a humanist. I would see him covering stories in New York. It's just a terrible shame he lost his life in this attack. It's ironic, because I am sure he sympathized with the Arab cause to a large degree, and there he is killed in an attack by Arab terrorists. I feel bad for him and his family. He had a wife and three kids.
There is this void there now. We had a view of the World Trade Center towers from my apartment, and I feel angry that this void has now been created in my city.
[My cameras] held up amazingly well. They were covered in ash and dust, and I was able to keep on shooting after that first building collapsed.
[This] is the most important story I have ever covered. In general, the media did a good job. Up to now, the media and the government were not paying enough attention to things that were going on, offering simplistic ideas of what the world situation was and ignoring a lot of world affairs.
[We are] finding out that now we are connected to the rest of the world. International photojournalism will be given a boost, especially in the magazine world, and [hopefully] we [won't] go back to the kind of celebrity and tabloid journalism that we've had to swallow.
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