New York photographer Richard Drew.
Richard Drew put down his camera bag and looked up at the colossal skyscraper that seemed to be racing toward the clouds at an accelerated clip.
“I’m really surprised how fast this building’s gone up,” he said of the rising edifice at 1 World Trade Center, peering at the monolith from beneath the brim of a tan baseball cap. “I just hope it isn’t another target.”
But he had nevertheless returned to retrace his steps for the first time since Sept. 11, 2001, when he had watched dozens die through the lens of a Nikon DCS620. On that similarly brilliant morning a decade ago, two planes had crashed into the Twin Towers by the time Drew emerged from the Chambers Street subway stop around a quarter after nine. The 110-story buildings looked like a pair of giant smokestacks spewing plumes of black soot into the crystal blue sky.
He began shooting, focusing on the topmost floors. It wasn’t long before he realized that some of the people trapped inside — as many as 200 of them, it was later estimated — had decided that plunging thousands of feet to their deaths was preferable to burning alive.
“There’s one. There’s another one,” he said, recalling the horrific scene with a detached ease. “I just started photographing people as they were falling.”
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