31 Photos From September 11th That You Have Never Seen

In 2001, digital cameras were a rare commodity. They were expensive, bulky and captured images that were inferior to the organic look of film. After you downloaded and edited those whopping 3.1 megapixel images, you had very few options of where you could publish them online. Remember when Shutterfly and Snapfish were a thing? Contrast that to today where you have people shooting magazine covers on cell phones and uploading over 500,000 images to Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and Facebook every minute. We don’t hear about national tragedies on the news anymore, we read about them in our Twitter and Facebook feeds. Seconds after they happen. When the events of 9/11 took place there were thousands of photographs taken by professional photographers and members of the press. These images were shown on the news and published in magazines and newspapers all across the country. Yet, few of these featured photographs were taken by everyday people. I wanted to set about curating a selection of photographs that most of you haven’t seen. Photographs captured by everyday people. Thanks to the internet these individuals have been able to publish their photos to Flickr, but most of them have less than a thousand, or even less than a hundred views. As I searched for these images it was like I was witnessing history again, but from an angle that no one had ever been shown. I decided to share these photographs with all of you. For the images that were captured on a digital camera, I’ve made a note of the model of the camera. All images are hosted on the account of the person that owns the photographs, none of them were taken down and re-hosted.

The photographer who took this photo mentions that at the time it didn’t occur to him how bad of an idea it was to walk so close to the tower right after it was struck. Later he discovered that he had been hit in the leg by a piece of falling metal, but didn’t notice it until hours later after he had settled down. If you read the comments you’ll find one by the owner of the open delivery truck you see in this image. He mentioned that the driver of the truck, seen in the blue shirt and pants survived the ordeal. The truck, however, was crushed. This image and the following were taken on an Olympus E-10. Photographer Jay Boucher says: “My wife had called me that morning to let me know she was safe. “Huh?” I said. She told me to turn on the TV and there was the Trade Center, burning. I grabbed my cameras and ran out to Hoboken’s Pier A. This is what I saw”.