Sean Rocha

My journals on September 11th, 2001

This is the second part of a two-part post.  Click here to read part one: my thoughts on the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks, which provides context for what I and others experienced that day.

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I almost always have a journal and a camera with me but I took no photographs at all on September 11th, 2001 or for days after.  I did not want to photograph the towers burning or the people shaking all around me as we stood on a street corner and watched them fall.  The only thing I now regret not having photographed were the major streets completely deserted at mid-day because I remember thinking that the desolation transformed New York and made it look like some other city but when I close my eyes now I can’t picture what that new, abandoned city looked like.  But I did not photograph it because, like many others at the time, I did not know how to comprehend this thing that had just happened and therefore, in a way, how to look at it.  But I did try to work out an understanding in words, in the pages of my journal, and of the many I wrote that day here are two — click to enlarge the images.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 2nd, 2011 at 8:30 am. It is filed under Latest Work and tagged with 9-11, Al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Egypt, Islam, Middle East, New York, politics, Saudi Arabia, terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.