September 11: Photography and the News

When a friend of mine learned I was writing a series of articles about September 11 and photography, she sent me a box of newspapers. For almost a quarter of a century, she held onto these pages as a tangible connection to September 11. While living through those uncertain early days, collecting newspapers helped her wrestle with the massive scope of the event, making it personal and manageable.

She anticipated the news coverage would become historical, and she wasn't the only one. In the museum’s collection, we have many examples of photography engaging with news accounts of September 11 that show photographers personalizing their relationship to news of the attacks and subsequent events.

The September 11 photograph from the museum’s collection I am most drawn to is a snapshot of a CNN television newscast. The 4x6-inch commercially developed color photograph stands in for how most of the United States and the world experienced September 11: watching the news for hours on television.

Photographs of television screens make fleeting and ephemeral news tangible and real. This snapshot is imbued with emotional and historical depth by the photographer's decision to bring the newsworthy event into their own personal experience. At some point, the photograph was removed from a personal collection, sold on eBay, and acquired by the museum in 2019 with assorted snapshots. At the time, film-based photography offered a limited number of exposures (12, 24, or 36). Taking, developing, and keeping snapshots were deliberate acts. We don’t know who took this photograph, so we can’t say what else might have been on the roll of film. Maybe snapshots of a birthday party, or vacation photos?

As I look at the newspapers my friend gave me, I’m struck by the February 12, 2002, issue of USA Today. While stories related to September 11 dominate the front page, they are surrounded by articles focused on normal life. The front page makes me consider the coexistence of the joy and mundanity of daily life—how Americans returned to their normal lives after enduring a national tragedy and personal trauma. And I wonder when editors and publishers decided that September 11 news, history, and experience would become just part of everyday life.

Today, news arrives via push notifications to the phones in our hands. As a result, we don’t see the varied stories of a newspaper page in the same way. Some folks still subscribe to a newspaper; however, print delivery has dropped by more than half in the last 20 years. The closest many of us, including me, now come to newsprint is a periodic scan of what’s above the fold in the stacks on our way out of the grocery store.

Can you think of the last time, if ever, you purchased a newspaper from a newspaper box? Jo Tartt’s Polaroid photographs picturing newspaper boxes from 2003–2004 in Washington, D.C., record a history of newspaper sales and delivery. The aesthetic of Polaroids, with their soft focus, rapid production, and slightly off colors, suggests what it was like to walk down the street glimpsing headlines and photographs. These bits of text and images in colorful metal and plastic boxes were designed to capture your attention and simultaneously convey a bit of information, hopefully enticing the passerby to put a quarter in the box to buy the paper. Through Tartt’s Polaroids—and the papers’ bold headlines and striking images—we can follow how many Americans encountered news about the unfolding of the war in Iraq on the streets of Washington and New York.

My friend collected the newspapers in her box whole, but people commonly incorporate the news into their own history by cutting photographs and articles to collect in journals, scrapbooks, and diaries. In the photograph series Newspaper Diary, Joanne Leonard cuts the above-the-fold photograph from newspapers (including captions and mastheads) and pairs it with images published in books. The image comparisons show that photographers, editors, and newspaper readers can often relate a newspaper’s photograph to historical paintings, other photographs, and graphic design. Among Leonard’s artworks is Deadly Explosions, which pushes the September 11 attacks to the background.

In Deadly Explosions, a New York Times newspaper photograph of an explosion that killed 250 people in Lagos, Nigeria, rests on top of an image of the Twin Towers from September 11, 2001. On that day, many commentators pointed out the contrast between the clear blue sky above New York City and the smoke, ash, and dust. For some, like Leonard and possibly the photographer and photo editors, the bright blue bowl against the disastrous smoky haze and rubble had aesthetic and thematic resonance. If a reader recalls the first images of September 11 while seeing the Lagos photograph, the photographic reference may deepen the interpretation.

The stack of newspapers on my table will be returned to their box shortly and stowed away again. Some of the news of the day was short-lived. Other stories and photos became the grounds for future photography and art, as people continually tried to make sense of the legacy of that day. By considering photography of news media, we can continue to learn about Americans’ experiences and memory of September 11, 2001. As the museum continues to collect different types of photographs documenting September 11, 2001, and its aftermath, we expand our ability to research and to recognize the day’s immediate and lasting impact. At the next big anniversary, will we see something new in them?