My 9/11 Story
Have you ever wanted to take a picture but didn’t have a camera?
It has happened to me many times. But the most memorable time it happened was when I was 15 years old, riding in a car along the Hudson River on the way to the airport.
You see, when I was 15, cameras weren’t as easy to come by. They didn’t sit in your pocket all day, every day, unless you had the money to have one. You couldn’t take a bunch of pictures and then delete the ones you didn’t want. Each exposure cost money.
And if you had a fancy camera back in those days, you needed a darkroom, or you had to pay someone to develop your film so you could actually see what your pictures looked like. You couldn’t take a picture, look at a screen, decide you didn’t like it, and take another. You definitely couldn’t take a 1,000 pictures because each and every image you took cost money to develop.
When I was a kid, nobody in my family was what I would now call a photography nerd.
Sure, we had cameras. You know, the Kodak 27-exposure cameras that you dropped off at Walgreens and picked up the 5×7 images two days later. The camera itself was tossed in the trash.
When I was little, I wasn’t allowed to have the camera because of one particular vacation.
My mom bought three cameras—one for herself, one for my brother, and one for me. I took all the pictures on my camera really quickly, and my mom was upset. When we developed the film, she was even more upset because I had taken random pictures.
We went on cruises when I was little, so I would take pictures of things like the ocean through the railings. The water in the pool. An ashtray on a chair. Rocks. Trees. I took pictures of strangers. I took pictures of nature.
That’s what I found fascinating.
But that’s not what my mom thought photography was for.
Photography was for taking pictures of her. Taking pictures of our family. Taking pictures of us in different places.
After that, I wasn’t allowed to have a camera on vacations.
We didn’t have a lot of money, so having all three of us with cameras was a treat. Usually, there was one camera for the entire family, and whenever I was with someone else in my family, that person was in control of the camera.
The only time I was really allowed to have a camera after that was when I went away to camp. My mom would always huff and puff when we got the film back from Walgreens because, again, I had taken pictures of things.
A bench.
A squirrel running in the woods. It was blurry.
Rocks.
Nature.
I’m a nature girl. I especially was when I was younger.
On September 11, 2001, I was a 15-year-old kid riding in the back seat of my dad’s SUV. My brother was in the seat next to me.
This was the first time I had seen my dad in quite some time. My parents weren’t together, and the reason my brother and I were in Newark, NJ, without our mother was because my Papapa (grandfather) had been on his deathbed.
My Papapa lived in New York City. We had flown from Arizona to New York to be with him. He died the day we arrived, three days earlier. We never got to see him before he passed.
We were supposed to fly home on September 11.
Instead, as we were driving along the Hudson River on our way to the airport, I noticed the smoke coming from New York City. I asked my dad what it was because I’d never been to New York before.
My dad gruffly said, “It’s a power plant,” as he swerved around a car that had stopped suddenly in the middle of traffic.
My brother scoffed and mouthed to me, “He’s an idiot. There is no power plant in the middle of NYC.”
“Then what is that?” I mouthed back.
My brother shrugged. This was his first time near NYC too.
People started pulling off to the side of the road. People were getting out of their cars. If they had cameras, they were taking pictures.
Meanwhile, we were still in the car, continuing toward the airport.
My dad was getting frustrated. His girlfriend was trying to calm him down. Then my dad’s girlfriend said, “Maybe we should turn off these CDs and listen to the radio.”
So she did.
And that’s when we heard, “The second tower has just been hit!”
That’s when we realized what was happening.
I asked my brother for the camera because I wanted to document what was happening, even though I didn’t fully understand the scale of what was happening.
My brother refused to give me the camera, so I told him, “Then YOU take a picture!”
Again, he refused.
“There are no people in it.”
I was so mad that I couldn’t take a picture.
We still had 23 exposures left on our little Kodak camera. Those four exposures had been used on something else. It was an extra camera that my mom had, and my brother refused to take any more pictures.
I was furious.
My dad said something that has stayed with me all these years. He said that he might not have been in our lives as much as he would have liked, but he was glad that he was there when we saw history happen.
We saw history happen.
And I have no pictures of it.
I have no pictures of us staying an extra two weeks in New Jersey. I have no pictures of the bus ride from New Jersey to Las Vegas, where our mom picked us up.
I have no pictures of that trip at all.
I only have the memories.
And now, 25 years later, I am a photographer.
I still take pictures of things other people might not think are worth photographing. I still photograph nature. I still photograph little details. I still see things and think, “I want to take a picture of that.”
Now, I don’t have to ask permission to take a picture.