I photographed the collapse of the Twin Towers from Jersey City’s harbor, just across the Hudson River from the World Trade Center.  After the first tower had fallen, I briefly went home and saw what I had just witnessed reproduced on TV. I sensed that my experience of watching the South Tower fall was being supplanted by the repetitive, numbing loop of imagery on CNN, accompanied by the pundits’ analyses of what it all had to mean.

I arrived back at the harbor just as the second tower fell.  By this time, evacuation efforts had begun and people were being ferried across the river to safety. A young woman, in shock, covered with dust, told me about seeing people jump from the towers to their deaths. Her testimony brought home how removed I felt from what was happening across the river.

Like many others in Jersey City, I had been on my way to Lower Manhattan when the attacks occurred. We were unable to cross into the city that day. All afternoon, as the Manhattan skyline burned, people came to the waterfront to take in the sight. For the first time since Pearl Harbor, an act of war and destruction, of outside aggression, had been visited upon America. Yet although we were eye witnesses to the events unfolding in time, separated from the scene only by the width of the river, there prevailed a sense of detachment that suspended onlookers in a strange limbo on this beautiful early fall day. The following morning I was one of maybe three people who managed to get on the first – and only – passenger ferry into Manhattan.