It’s all there in this photograph of first responders reduced to helpless bystanders in a wilderness of pulverized concrete. We cannot see what they see, but in their attitude of stricken astonishment we feel it—the recognition of the unrecognizable that confronted us on that Tuesday morning in September. We see them standing in that ashen pall, like the last survivors of a lost time, and it comes only as an afterthought that they appear not to notice the one other living thing we know was there—the photographer, my friend and colleague Gilles Peress.
Gilles was the first person after my parents whom I called that morning. He was already on the Brooklyn Bridge, carrying his cameras into lower Manhattan against the tide of tens of thousands fleeing the gashed and burning towers. “We’re under attack,” he said by way of explanation. Then, right before we lost connection, he said, just as matter-of-factly, “This is fucking insane.”
By “this,” I understood him to mean everything about the scene of consuming violence—everything but the fact that he was heading into it. That made perfect sense; he was in his element. Gilles became a photographer in his twenties, in the nineteen-seventies, because studying literature and philosophy and political theory had undermined his trust in language. And it turned out he had a genius for photography. Over the decades, in Northern Ireland, Iran, the Balkans, Rwanda, and wherever else he went, he had come as close as anyone with a camera to realizing what Joseph Conrad described as the artist-chronicler’s task: “It is, before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything.” Better yet, rather than making you see, Gilles lets you see—admitting you, with each click of the shutter, to join him as he enters into an immediate and transparent intimacy with lives lived in the teeth of history.
Gilles reached the World Trade Center just before the second tower collapsed. The firemen in the photograph don’t know what’s hit them. The one holding an unlit flashlight, the one with the useless gurney—they stand in their desert of ruin, frozen before the obliteration of their expectations, and ours. There it is: ashes to ashes, dust to dust, no metaphors. And yet, as we sensed in the haze of that moment and see too clearly today, it’s not a picture of an ending but, more truly, of a condition without end. ♦
