Eyewitness: Your Photos
Did you take photos on September 11, 2001, and in the days that followed? Send your photos, and the stories behind them, to magazine@amherst.edu, and we'll post them or link to them here.
On the morning of September 11, 2001, Jed Miller ’88 was at his home in Brooklyn, N.Y., when he heard a loud boom. Before long he saw a plume of dark smoke in the sky behind the brownstones across his street. “My camera happened to have a new roll of film,” he writes on his Website, “so I put on a hat and went up the hill to the Promenade, which sits on the East River below the Brooklyn Bridge and overlooks downtown. It was packed with people.”
From the Promenade, Miller photographed the World Trade towers burning in the distance, the south tower as it fell and the crowd that watched in shock. To see his photos and to read his account of the day, go to www.jedmiller.com/graphics.
Bob Kaufman '83 was 5,000 miles away in Anchorage, Alaska, when he heard about the attacks. He watched on TV as the twin towers collapsed, then went into the office. "But I couldn't concentrate," he writes in his blog. "I decided I had to get back to New York to see it for myself."
Kaufman chartered a flight to New York City and was soon working at Ground Zero. After taking pictures of an area of Ground Zero off-limits to media and most volunteers, he e-mailed a slide show to a few dozen friends. "Something in the slide show apparently resonated," Kaufman writes. "It ricocheted literally around the world." He received hundreds of messages from strangers, including from a man who lost his brother in the attacks.
To watch the slide show and to read a sampling of the e-mails, go to Kaufman's Website.