Ground Zero – the observer’s dilemma

It was the autumn (fall) of 2002 and I found myself in New York for work. At the time I worked in London for a US law firm. I wasn’t a professional photographer and certainly didn’t think of myself as a documentary photographer. I had taken a camera with me and, on a free day, set off on what turned out to be something of “Big Day Out” in miles covered – simply walking through the city and taking photographs as I went.

Ground Zero was not the purpose of the day, but I felt that, being in New York just over a year after 9/11, I should go and see it. I already had the camera with me.

What I hadn’t anticipated was how uncomfortable I would feel once I got there – not only about what I was seeing around the site, but about my own position as someone who had come to look and who happened to be carrying a camera.

The first thing that struck me was the sheer amount of merchandise being sold around the railings of St Paul’s Chapel. Postcards, calendars, hats, models — seemingly anything onto which you could put an image of the World Trade Center towers. There were people fundraising for the homeless near the entrance to the church, and inside was a large display about the chapel’s ministry since 9/11. But outside, stalls stretched across the frontage and onto the pavement.

I wasn’t sure what to expect. I didn’t really know the etiquette.

In my mind I had imagined something closer in atmosphere to visiting Auschwitz, Srebrenica or another place where mass death and suffering leave such a deep echo that you somehow expect even the birds to have stopped singing. I don’t mean to compare the events themselves, but that was the sort of solemnity I had expected to encounter.

The main recovery operation at Ground Zero had ended in May, but this was still, in a very real sense, a place containing the dead. Human remains would continue to be recovered during later searches of the site or more than another decade. The “pit” was not simply a construction site in waiting.

What I encountered were extremes in response. After the commercialisation came noise. Most people were quiet, some completely silent. Many seemed to be treating the visit almost as a pilgrimage. They took time to read the banners and handwritten messages attached to the fencing, or to look at the flowers and soft toys that children had left.

And then there would be bursts of completely different behaviour: groups laughing and joking, eating food, posing for photographs or simply moving around with the atmosphere of a day out at the zoo. This was unexpected but perhaps understandable.

The original public viewing platform had already gone by the time I visited; in its place was a viewing wall around the site. There was no completed memorial and Ground Zero was still an active and tightly controlled place – because it was still partially active. So tourist behaviour was polarised – communal mourning on one hand and commercialised curiosity or “dark tourism” on the other.

There was one NYPD officer there when I visited and most people fell silent by the time they walked past him.

I wasn’t alone in feeling uneasy about the commercialisation and how it affected behaviour. Two months later, families of 9/11 victims were publicly calling for a two-block vendor-free zone around Ground Zero because of the amount of attack-related merchandise being sold there. For the most part, I observed people stopping, looking and taking a moment to be quiet. Very few of them raised a camera which made me increasing conscious of mine.

Looking at the photographs now, after more than two decades working as a photographer, I’m struck by how cautious they are. I stayed back. I photographed people from behind or at a distance. I rarely pushed forward for a face or a reaction. I was someone with an interest in photography encountering, probably for the first time, a situation in which the act of taking a photograph suddenly carried an ethical weight. At the time that felt like respect.

Nearly twenty-five years later, I’m less certain whether experience would make me photograph differently. Perhaps I would move closer now. Perhaps I would wait for faces and reactions, notice the exhausted police officer rather than simply photograph the fact that a policeman was there, and work harder to make pictures that said more about the people around me.

I’m less certain now whether experience would have made me photograph differently or simply made me better at judging what the boundaries are. That uncertainty may also explain why I have never published these photographs around the anniversary of 9/11.