No, it was not “like a disaster movie.”

20-year-old photograph, at the real dawn of the digital age.

Have the types of screen we have erected in our minds detached us from the nakedness of experience itself? — David Thomson, Film Comment

This Wednesday night, I was streaming the bravura sequence in sci-fi disaster film Cloverfield. It’s that electrifyingly digital set piece, shot with hand-held video camera, where the POV roams a New York City loft party as it gets rocked by a city-quaking impact. The screen judders as the POV runs with the crowd downstairs and onto the street to see a building ten blocks away struck by soaring chunk of debris, then operatically cascade to earth, sending a tsunami of soot, ash, and debris to the camera. Which is where, for the first of a dozen times I’ve rewatched this, I abruptly felt sick, scared, angry, then pushed “STOP.” I had a nightmare that night and the next, which, given today’s date, feels a bit too on the nose. But here it is.

Twenty years ago today, I was in a crowd of people, 20 blocks above the World Trade Center, watching as a wacky New York story abruptly switched genres. I’d been a print journalist for ten years — recently, staff writer at New York and SPIN magazines — living in New York City for the previous six. I took photos and notes that day, wrote about it in scores of ways, but there’s one basic point I want to make today. That what we video of that event is as much like the real thing as a video of a lake’s like jumping in it.

“Those in the middle of historical events most people only know from TV can feel they missed the thing,” wrote the British novelist James Meek. “Because their memories don’t conform to whatever iconic thirty-second clip comes to stand for the event in most people’s minds.” Part of this is scale, part’s history, part’s the altered nature of our media.

Of the many things “9/11” was, one was clearly an inflection point. The moment the analog world went digital. No spectacular act of violence was ever captured on video from so many angles, by amateurs, or looped so endlessly on media channels. Cut-up, rewound, re-edited, rewatched, paused, rerun. Our culture digested and excreted it without tasting. Seeing, hearing, or feeling. This are things that print can help with, so here goes.

As you were walking south before 10 am, the event changed about every 10 blocks. There were no smart phones, no Twitter, no streaming video. Updates came “War of the Worlds”-style, by radio through word of mouth. At East 14th Street: small plane, freak accident. Houston: jet plane, freak accident. Eighth Street: two jets, hijacking. At Washington Square, you saw something else.

From the top of Washington Square, the monument’s inner curve framed a Renaissance painting hellscape: The Twin Towers spewing ash-gray billows, cut by brilliant streaks of fire. The spotless sky made it look closer than it was and there was an electric giddiness in the crowd. We were too far and low-tech to see bodies fall from upper floors.

A dozen blocks further south, a crowd filled an intersection at Houston Street, spreading out to store windows. In the standing, swaying, talking crowd, I took photos with an actual camera: a compact, chrome point-and-shoot Canon Elph ET, with a 23mm lens and 4x6 aspect ratio. You dropped the film cartridge in the back and retrieved it after exposing the roll. I was doing this at one point when, after slapping the back shut, I looked up.

I blinked twice at what I saw. A sudden bloom of orange, 20 stories from the top. I started to talking my girlfriend as I shot. “What’s­ — that’s,” I said, eye in the viewfinder. “I mean, that’s really — Oh!”

In two days, journalists would report that what happened south of Vesey Street looked “just like a Hollywood disaster movie.” This is true except for those details that make it utterly, existentially wrong.

I don’t mean this morally — that films are fake and this is real, these were people not actors, how dare you. I mean it experientially. I say it having witnessed both the event and disaster films, as well as films of this disaster. Within an hour, I was watching them with everyone else, hourly on several channels, and feeling much less than I was meant to. But I spent a solid decade trying to unsee what was against that stark blue sky just before 10 am.

No one in the intersection with me saw a disaster film. I don’t know what they saw, but it wasn’t a film. This film had no frame around it. This film happened just once. This film had no teaser preview outside our nightmares.

Here’s what I saw: a rift in the sky, breach in reality. This is not exaggeration, it’s reporting. An explosion near the top gets answered by something below our sightline. Then, what you see makes your guts drop right out. A 1,000-foot fixture in reality’s topography becomes a waterfall of glass and steel. Then a column of umber smoke. In two-point-five seconds. The first half I see through my eyes. The rest through a viewfinder, where it remains, in perspective, proof it’s not what I thought I saw.

Twenty years before this, I’d to terrorize myself listening to a song I found on the left-hand dial, “O Superman” by Laurie Anderson. This minimalist synthesizer pop song became a horror film when the genderless vocoder speak-sings “This is the hand, the hand that takes. Here come the planes.” That’s what I saw that day, for a split-second: the hand that takes. I saw a malevolent god — always there but never seen — reach out a massive paw and slam a skyscraper to the ground.

My photos made a sequence. Exploding tower. Shorter tower. Tower being swallowed up in smoke. Thick black-umber column. Broken faces. Welling eyes. Hands over mouths. Hugs, cinches, clutches, spouses, friends, strangers. My first photo is of two thousand people dying, 20 blocks away. The others are of witnesses: sobbing, howling, collapsing. One raising a hand to sky. Another putting hers to her mouth. The last photo on that cartridge is a striking young woman, 30, her face much closer than the others, one hand to her mouth. Tiny brilliant rivulets along her fine features. Aqua eyes gaze off toward a colossal afterimage, now just out of shot.

This was my girlfriend at the time, the photographer and filmmaker Cat Del Buono, and she knew what she just saw. She said she saw a thousand human deaths. We turned away, aghast, ashamed, and joined the slow-moving current of people heading north, in an eerie quiet.

We regained Washington Square, we weren’t halfway across the plaza, the crowd beyond obscured by trees, when this crowd’s sound hits us. A human sound I’ll never forget. One I’d only heard in nightmares. I had these nightmares in the Cold War ’80s, when kids my age were catching on that they could vanish in a mushroom cloud. I never saw the cloud in my dreams, I just heard the human sound of people who did: a wail-gasp-scream somehow compressed into a single noise. One survivor of the Titanic, on a lifeboat when the ship’s hull split and plunged remaining passengers into the sea, compared the sound they made to a home run in Yankee Stadium, only different. That’s the sound you heard on New York’s streets when the second tower fell.

My friend R was 54 at the time, and worked as satellite coordinator for one of the three major news networks, gathering raw video and audio feeds — all one-beat scenes — and beaming them out to the network’s 300 U.S. and foreign news affiliates. By the night of September 11, he was receiving hundreds of clips from random people whose cameras were trained on the doomed towers. By the time the second jet that hit the North tower, every camera in the Tri-State Area was there to capture the spectacle.

By October, R’s feeds were coming from cameras set up atop buildings surrounding the former World Trade Center: fixed and trained down on the crater’s active worksite. It was a non-stop feed of hardhats in a construction pit: hoisting iron beams, cutting them up, hauling them out , spot-lit but unobserved. Every so often, one or two hardhats would stop work, straighten up to stand, and wave the others over. They’d gather around the unearthed body or body part, remove their hardhats, stand still for a moment, then go back to work. R is among their very few eyewitnesses to these silent, spontaneous memorials. Today, he describes an internal shift he felt watching them in terms of media technology.

“Digital is one step removed from being alive,” he told me. “Analog is alive — it’s up and down, up and down. Digital just streams numbers.” Each time he saw the men stop work to gather and stand vigil, some part of his internal fabric re-knitted itself. “It’s like I regained a connection to organic human life.”

In 1945, scientists produced a light in New Mexico’s desert that had never been seen on Earth. It was “golden, purple, violet, gray, and blue,” one witness, a US Army general, remembered, with a “clarity and beauty that cannot be described but must be seen to be imagined.” Movie cameras there shot plenty of color footage. It’s just that their subject destroyed the film. Environmental physicist Jack Aeby produced the one successful color image, shooting with a 35mm Perfex 33, on Ansochrome film, at 1/100, f4. His photograph shows a brilliant orange carnation blooming at the bottom of a 50-gallon oil drum.

Despite 10,000 times more witnesses, many shooting color video, the destruction of the Twin Towers was, in its way, unfilmable. All these clips, from so many different angles, gesture at an event that’s defined by singularity. It happened once, in human time, its meaning dissolves in the infinite loop. WW II’s most famous photographer, Robert Capra, came upon piles of naked bodies at a newly liberated concentration camp. He didn’t take any pictures because, he said, the sites “were swarming with photographers. And every new picture of horror served only to diminish the total effect.” Capra was a professional war photographer. The World Trade Center attacks were filmed by amateurs.

In a way, every video clip eroded it a bit more as it spread spectacle around the world. The contrast was so stark within the city: inside, TV showed one reality. Outside, the air choked us with another. It’s a bitter, complex smell of some impossibly massive modern failure: concrete, glass, steel, granite, and other unburnable substances burning. Melted transformers, turbines, drywall, paper, human bones, hair. I know why people talk about the permeating smell, that pungent metallic odor with notes of synthetic chemicals and burning peat. It united us all and was gone by winter, unsearchable on YouTube. My TV news friend R went to the site two weeks after September 11, bringing a 35-millimeter Canon EOS to document it. When he came out of that subway, the wind shifted and he was hit by smell so intense that it permanently damaged his olfactory organs. He’s still largely unable to smell.

I’d lived in the city for nine years prior to September, 2001. I only felt like a New Yorker that October, and, in some says, I’ve felt less and less American ever since. Five years later, I no longer had to suppress a snarl at visiting relatives who said “Ground Zero” was their top tourist site. But I’m still amazed at how quickly, appallingly, the media branded that tragedy into a three-digit tagline, effectively made it a corporate sponsor. The one that brought the world U.S. military hellstorms for the next 20 years. Branded content of a digital world, “9/11” produced all-too-analog wars very few digital Americans either heard or saw.

Any talismanic significance that “9/11” might have had was lost on me nine years ago, when my wife and I had our first and only child. When she went into labor, it was unclear if his birthday would be the 10th or 11th. A friend asked if I was glad it was the 10th, I realized I didn’t care. No tragedy gets to own a date.

As far as I know, my son hasn’t seen “9/11” video coverage on YouTube. But when he does, I can’t imagine what sense it will make. How shocked can he be by the collapse of a tower he’s never seen just standing? To him, they’re only jpegs, mpegs, gifs, stories. For me, they were irrefutable parts of hard reality. Their construction began a year before I was born.

Last night, I scrolled through back through the massive cache of digital images I have stored in what’s too aptly called “the cloud.” I watched my wife get younger, foxier. I watched our son get smaller, chubbier — now a kindergartner, now a baby — and then softly vanish. All these images of my former life seemed continuous with present day: all in the same bright, saturated glow of backlit digital photography. Then I hit the scans of analog photos, shot 20 years ago, which is when life became a dream.

Also published on medium.com