In Pictures: 20 images that documented the horror of 9/11

11 September 2021, 07:04

Sept 11 Photo Gallery
Sept 11 Photo Gallery. Picture: PA

The day was captured in pictures from bystanders, security cameras and even the International Space Station

September 11 was a day of indelible images — apocalyptic, surreal, violent, ghostly, both monumental and profoundly personal. Wrenching to remember. Impossible to forget.

The terrorist attacks in the US were captured in countless pictures by news photographers, bystanders, emergency service personnel, security cameras, FBI agents and others. Even an astronaut on the International Space Station took some.

Twenty years later, The Associated Press has curated 20 of its photographers’ frames from the day, when hijackers used commercial planes as missiles and crashed into New York’s World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.

A plane approaches New York’s World Trade Centre moments before it struck the tower (William Kratzke/AP)
People flee the falling South Tower (/Amy Sancetta/AP)
Firefighters work beneath the destroyed mullions of the World Trade Centre (Mark Lennihan/AP)

The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people and toppled the 110-storey Twin Towers.

Pedestrians in lower Manhattan (Amy Sancetta/AP)
Flames and debris explode from the second tower (Chao Soi Cheong/AP)
Thousands were injured (Diane Bondareff/AP)

The photos document the enormity, chaos and emotion of 9/11 on every scale, from panoramic views of smoke rising over New York’s skyline to a close-up of the anxious, smudged face of a woman hastening down a street blanketed with ashen dust.

Smoke billows through buildings in Manhattan (Kathy Willens/AP)
Fire and smoke billows from the North Tower (David Karp/AP)

Street scenes chart escalating horror as people stare and weep at the burning skyscrapers, then run from the dust cloud billowing through lower Manhattan after one of them crumbles.

Two women hold each other as they watch the World Trade Centre burn (Ernesto Mora/AP)
Pedestrians flee the area (Amy Sancetta/AP)

Flames shoot from the windows of the Pentagon, a global symbol of military might that proved vulnerable to an attack by a handful of Islamic militants.

Flames and smoke pour from a building at the Pentagon in Washington DC (Will Morris/AP)
Deputy chief of the Army Reserve, Col Malcolm Bruce Westcott, comforts Pentagon employee Racquel Kelley while giving her medical aid (Will Morris/AP)

Some show more intimate views of pain, but also humanity — an injured firefighter’s screaming face; a woman walking through the eerie blizzard of Trade Centre debris with her arm around someone else’s shoulder.

People cover their faces as they escape the collapse (Suzanne Plunkett/AP)
People walk over New York’s Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan (Mark Lennihan/AP)
The remains of the World Trade Centre (Alexandre Fuchs/AP)

There are images of determination, including firefighters working amid the smoky rubble and a shopkeeper sweeping up the dust of catastrophe.

A fireman screams in pain as he is rescued shortly after both towers collapsed (Robert Mecea/Newsday via AP)
Harry Shasho sweeps up before being evacuated from his store (Suzanne Plunkett/AP)
A firefighter moves through piles of debris (Graham Morrison/AP)

Finally, as night falls, people gaze across New York Harbour at the smoke, trying to make sense of what happened in front of their eyes.

As we still are today.

Pedestrians on Pierrepont Place in the Brooklyn borough of New York (Lawrence Jackson/AP)

By Press Association

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