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By Soo Kim and Phil Penman
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Standing outside a J&R electronics store in Lower Manhattan on the morning of September 11 in 2001, I was struck by a haunting silence.
The moments after the fall of the first tower were not marked by screams and wailing, but were eerily quiet, with maybe a bleak siren heard in the distance.
The one thing I do remember hearing is the faint sound of papers raining down from the sky—papers that were from the offices of the tower that had collapsed.
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It felt like time had stopped. Before I ran into J&R to take cover, the streets of Manhattan were completely normal.
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Just a couple of hours earlier, I had just come home after working until about 3 a.m., covering an event with Lenny Kravitz and Rachel Hunter. As soon as I got back to my Murray Hill apartment on 35th Street and 3rd Avenue, my phone rang. My first instinct was that it must be a work call, and I told myself: "Yeah, I'm not picking it up. I've just finished work, and it's my first day off after working for six months straight."
The ring eventually went to voicemail, and I assumed it was my mom. But it was actually a message from a colleague, a reporter at photo agency Splash News, saying: "Look Phil, I know it's your day off, but you might want to check this out because the World Trade Center's just been hit by a plane."
I immediately turned my television on and switched to the NY1 local news channel, and saw the flames billowing out of the tower. I grabbed my bag and flew out the door in five minutes to get down there as quickly as I could.
I fell in love with New York City after my first visit when I was 16, and I knew I wanted to live there. I later moved from the United Kingdom to Los Angeles, where I worked before I moved to the Big Apple to set up our New York City office as a young 24-year-old photographer.
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But nothing could have prepared me for how my life was about to change after I flew out of my apartment following the fateful call from my colleague.
I jumped on my bike and raced through every red traffic light while trying to figure out what would be a good vantage point to see the tower without being too close. I went straight to Soho, as I remembered there used to be an amazing view of the towers from West Broadway and Houston Street. I cycled past pedestrians who were just walking around, as no one really knew what had happened. We didn’t know that it was a terror attack. We didn't know anything at that point.
I arrived at the Park Row area, where the J&R store was, and the north tower came down just as I was photographing it. I could see that the tower beams were getting closer to me in the viewfinder of my camera as I kept shooting.
Some firemen came around warning those in the area that we needed to run, and we dashed into J&R as the sky just went completely black. You couldn't see anything at all through the window inside the store.
I started questioning myself, wondering whether I should be taking pictures of these people in the most horrific moment of their lives. But I took a picture inside J&R after a man named John Paul Devito came running into the store screaming.
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Some people were standing toward the back of the store, while the police were near the front by the door. There were some people in business suits, just walking around looking at DVDs. Not many really knew what was going on at this point. But I knew, and so did John Paul, who stormed into the store earlier. It was a surreal scene to see him standing there, completely covered in ashes, while everything else appeared completely normal in the store, and I asked if I could take his picture.
When I finally came out of J&R and stood looking down a street, I don’t know what it was, but something was telling me not to go down there. So, I didn't, and soon after, the second tower came down along that street.
Then I saw these three men covered in ash emerge from that direction, walking toward me. I don’t know how, but Joseph Kelly, Srinath Jinadasa, and George Sleigh narrowly escaped the collapse of the second tower. I remember going right in front of them to take some pictures, and they later said they do remember their picture being taken by me.
My photographs from that day were published all over the world, and many of those pictured reached out to me. I’ve reconnected with a lot of them, spoken with them, and shared emails since.
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I’ve spent time with Srinath and his wife in Jacksonville, where they had me stay over and cooked for me. I became very close with George as well. His daughter knew that he was alive because she saw that picture of him in the newspaper. George and I stayed in touch when he moved out of the city. I went to see him, and we spent a long time together.
Every year on the anniversary of 9/11, Joseph, Srinath, George, and I would check in on each other. Around six years after the attacks, I remember coming out of a movie theater in the East Village of Manhattan, checking my emails to see if I'd missed anything, and I had an email from George. It wasn't anything bad, but I unexpectedly just broke down in tears on the street.
He later suddenly stopped responding to my emails, and I got a message from his wife, saying that George was not well, and that it was very difficult for her. We spoke a couple more times after that, and I later got an email from his daughter saying that he had passed away. Srinath is the only one left of the trio from that photograph, as Joseph passed away before George as well.
The impact was almost worse after the day of 9/11 because I was photographing funerals and people who lost loved ones for the next year—I couldn't get away from it. On the year-anniversary, I had to cover 30 features of different people, meet kids who never got to meet their dad, and that was an absolute beating. It was just endless.
So, for two years, I couldn’t face talking about it. I went to the 9/11 site on the year-anniversary and later once more with my friend Joanne "Jojo" Capestro, another survivor, I photographed on the day of the attacks. In 2015, I donated my photographic work from the attacks to the 9/11 museum.
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I believe everything happens for a reason. There was a reason I was there that day, and there was a reason I was taking those pictures. Even though in retrospect, I had wished I’d stayed at the site longer, if I hadn't left at the time that I did, I would have experienced the health problems many survivors are still experiencing today. And if I decided to go down that street to get some more pictures minutes before the second tower collapsed, I'd simply not be here today.
I now do talks around the world about my work and experience on 9/11, and I’ve found that it can help to talk about it. But it wasn’t always this way. It took me two years before I could speak about my experience.
I feel grateful to have been able to document something like this and connect with people like Jojo, who said many never believed her experience until they saw the image of her that I’d taken that day.
These were the most iconic images that I’ve ever taken in my career, and not because of photographic skill, but because I happened to be there on that day at the right time. It changed my entire career.
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It changed me and the way that I see life. How can you ever see things the same again after that? It forces you to grow up when you go through something like that. But I hope I don't have to photograph anything like this ever again.
It is insane that it has been 25 years since 9/11. It’s a moment in my life that will stay with me forever, and I will have to go through it again every year. I don’t think I will ever truly grasp the magnitude of how big that day was. It’s too much to process.
I still get choked up all the time and have glimpses of moments from the day. I remember people helping each other. A priest helping a woman in an ambulance, a person creating a makeshift leg brace for a casualty on the street.
Many people lost someone that day—a father, a mother, a daughter. I've lost too many friends too soon. These people weren't soldiers. They were just people going to work.
I know some may want to forget the event, but I truly hope we never forget the people we lost.
Phil Penman is a photographer living in New York City.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Sirena Bergman and Tony Phillips.
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