Capturing a City's Emotion in the Days After 9/11 (2024)

Nina Berman photographed the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Later she put some of those images together in diptychs and triptychs.

Ms. Berman lives in New York and is a member of the photographer-owned photo agency Noor. She spoke with James Estrin about her post-Sept. 11 work as well as her projects “Purple Hearts — Back From Iraq” (Trolley, 2004) and “Homeland” (Trolley, 2008). Their conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Q.

What were you doing the morning of 9/11?

A.

I wasn’t in New York when the planes hit the towers.

I was following farm workers in a pickup truck into fields at 5:30 a.m. in Oregon and listening to the radio reports of a Cessna hitting the trade center. And then of course, the reports started to change. And so the whole day, where I was, no one talked about it, you know. It wasn’t even acknowledged. People just were in the fields picking cucumbers for a few dollars each day to feed their family.

And then I saw The Times the next day, and it was pretty emotional. So I came back three days later on the first flight out of Portland, Ore. I think the first thing that struck me is all the pictures of the missing people, who it turned out were dead, plastered everywhere. I didn’t try and get down into this ground zero, into the pit, and I just started to wander around the financial district at different times of the day and night.

I got back to the city three days later and I started shooting black-and-white film, mostly Konica infrared film. I was just following my feelings about the aftermath, not really looking for news but just looking to try and communicate the emotions I found in the city.

Only one or two were part of a work assignment. I started putting them together to see if I could come up with some deeper meaning by connecting images together — premonitions of things to come.

Q.

Give me an example.

A.

There’s one with a lonely, figure, far off in the distance in the financial district, paired with the crowd of people from the back.

I think there was a sense of both loneliness and danger, and then a sense of love and sensitivity among strangers, that many people felt intensely in New York shortly after 9/11. I have lived most of my life here. And had never seen anything quite like that.

There’s a second one which is actually three pictures, two verticals and a horizontal, and in these you see the shadow of a police officer. For me this had the sense of figures trying to go about their daily lives amidst this new kind of security presence, which I had also never seen in New York before.

Q.

Didn’t 9/11 influence your life and your work for the next decade?

A.

Yes. I mean, the security was very shocking to me. There was this really enormous sense of a desire for peace and togetherness and then that quickly turns into a more revenge mode. And that sense of what is required to feel secure as opposed to something else, maybe something more aggressive. I’m trying to figure out where that line is.

Q.

9/11 led to this series of wars and heightened security. You photographed injured veterans and the security business.

A.

We think of the world in some ways as a post-9/11 and pre-9/11, right?

Q.

I do.

A.

Police in militarized uniforms with very powerful weapons have become very commonplace.

Q.

There was this intense sorrow that lasted so long after the attacks on 9/11. But people helped each other so much and New York became a kinder place, I believe.

A.

I call this period afterglow because there was a moment where things could have been quite different, a moment of togetherness.

I remember driving my car in New York and just picking up random people who needed to get downtown. But I would never do that now.

Q.

You said these photos were made following your feelings. Can you elaborate?

A.

There was definitely a certain sadness in the pictures and also a sense of loneliness and dust. And then a sense of an ominous security presence.

I felt that you’re either watching someone or being watched. That’s where we were heading. I freaked out at all the weapons. I had never seen so many automatic weapons and snipers in New York City.

The National Guard’s constant orders not to photograph things became a very, very big theme. Telling photographers not to photograph anything anymore started then. To this day, if you start taking photographs of buildings downtown you could get yelled at.

Q.

Why did you use the Konica infrared film?

A.

It’s a mild infrared film that makes the sky darker, the blacks much more black and the whites much more light. It has a sense of some sort of radiation or explosion. Some of these photos are not with infrared.

Q.

So you went right from 9/11 into starting the “Homeland” project where you looked at what you called the militarization of American culture after 9/11.

A.

I started working in color for Time for about two months. Photographing the sense of fragility in the city and the weird security situation. And I would just wander looking for moody pictures. I shot my first “Homeland” picture at the Columbus Day parade.

Q.

And when did you start photographing your injured veterans series “Purple Hearts?”

A.

In the summer of 2003 just a few months after the war started.

Q.

What do you think about when Sept. 11 comes around now?

A.

I didn’t want to go down there for the anniversary because I feel that what 9/11 unleashed was so brutal and violent. I think about the wars that 9/11 resulted in, and about what Iraq and Afghanistan are like today.

I also think of all the veterans who were wounded. I’m still photographing stories of veterans. I think about all the lives lost, women who’ve lost their husbands, children who lost their fathers and people who still are suffering massive health impacts from 9/11.

It’s a major tragedy. But it’s become something else, too.

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