September 11, 2001: I was a sophomore in college. The one morning I didn’t turn on the TV. I went to class, blissfully unaware, and took an exam. I didn’t know a thing until almost 11am. By then, the Twin Towers were gone.
I’ve written about my memories of 9/11 here before and even about how Harry Potter and 9/11 share their own weird connection. I know many of us will recall for the rest of our lives where we were and what we were doing on that day. I’m sure many of you will even be sharing those memories on your own blogs.
A decade later, I want to share a very unique 9/11 story: my dad’s.
This is my dad – Papa – Akira Suwa.
He’s a photojournalist for The Philadelphia Inquirer. At 69 years old, he’s been a photographer at the Inquirer for the last 34 years.
September 11, 2001 was a Tuesday: his regular day off. And yet like so many other times in his life, he picked up his camera, got in his car, and headed toward the chaos from which so many other people fled.
I realized, after 10 years, I never really asked my dad what that day was like for him as a photojournalist. So I sat down and Skyped with my Papa this week to talk about what his experience was like and what he remembered. So to commemorate the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I share with you my dad’s story.
. . .
“At the other side of the camera, there is a human being, and that human being is trying to stay alive, trying to capture, trying to get the message out to the world, and trying to stay safe.”
– Joao Silva, Bang-Bang Club war photographer
. . .
“It was my day off.”
My mom had just made coffee and came upstairs. She was sitting on the edge of their bed watching The Today Show when Flight 11 crashed into Tower 1. She shouted for my father, who had just gotten out of the shower, “Akira! A plane just crashed into the World Trade Center! Come look, it’s on TV right now!” He ran into the bedroom with just a towel. My parents watched in horror as Flight 175 crashed into Tower 2, live on TV, as millions did that morning.
In his gut, he knew it was a terrorist act: thirty-plus years of journalism experience had taught him that all too well. He threw on a quick change of clothes and was out the door in minutes. He told my mom that he was headed to New York to cover the story.
For my mom, my dad’s sudden departure felt eerily similar to when my dad left for Iraq within hours of President George H. W. Bush’s announcement of Operation: Desert Storm ten years prior. But my mom understood my dad had a job to do.
While my parents aren’t very religious people, she made him sit with her while she said a quick prayer. And with that, my dad was on the Turnpike, a sea of southbound traffic on the other side of the road as he drove toward New York.
My dad hadn’t even packed a bag: no toothbrush, no medicine, no change of clothes. Just his cell phone and a trunk full of cameras and equipment.
“Because I’ve worked so many years for the newspaper, I can judge whether it’s big news or not big news,” my dad told me. “I could tell, as soon as I saw it on tv, this was one of the biggest news stories ever, so I knew I had to cover it. My intuition worked out right away.”
He tried in vain to get into the city via the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, but both had already been closed. He tried to cross the George Washington Bridge but that too, was closed to incoming traffic. He ended up getting some shots along the river from the New Jersey side.
Figuring he couldn’t get into the city, he turned around and came home to begin transmitting pictures to the office.
He had been home only for a short while when his Assigning Editor called him, telling him to go back and try to get in the city. He packed a bag. But he didn’t know yet when he would be coming home.
Since it’s been a decade, my dad’s memory of exactly how he got into the city was a little fuzzy. He remembers parking his car somewhere in New Jersey and taking a train into downtown Manhattan. He’s not sure if it was the NY Subway or NJ Transit; he just remembers taking one of the few inbound running trains.
“I was so lucky I even got into the city,” he told me.
“It was like the moon.”
When my dad came topside, everything was covered in a thick layer of dust and ash.
“A couple inches thick,” he said. “It was like the moon, because when you walked, there was dust all over the place. I didn’t have a mask and I tried to avoid it as much as I could. I saw cars covered in it, mangled burnt cars. It looked like after a volcano explodes.”
“Most of the time I was walking,” he continued. “I walked all the way to Wall Street.”
It was around 3pm when my dad made it into the city. Most of Ground Zero had been closed off at this point and the press was being kept back at a radius of about 5 to 6 city blocks.
Well, most of the press, that is.
“I was treated like an outsider.”
My dad was quick to notice that members of the New York press were given more exclusive access to Ground Zero, such as shooting from the roofs of buildings right next to the site. Other non-New York media outlets couldn’t get that close. “I was treated like an outsider,” he recalls.
When my dad went to Guiliani’s press conference, he specifically asked if non-New York journalists would be granted close-up access to cover rescue efforts and the damage at Ground Zero. Giuliani’s camp promised that access would come soon to all journalists, regardless of what outlet they were from.
That promise never came to fruition. More frustrating for my father was when he found out that native New Yorker freelancers were getting exclusive access over photographers from major international outlets. Freelancers didn’t even have press badges.
“New York press got special treatment,” my dad said.”Certain people got certain privileges.”
When it came to interacting with New York officials, my dad encountered roadblock after roadblock. Whether it was NYPD or NYFD, there was no consistent standard of access. It changed minute by minute and from officer to officer.
At one point, he tried to take a picture of some firefighters resting. One of the firefighters came over to him and said, “Don’t take our picture.” So my dad backed off.
“I wasn’t going to get arrested just to try and take pictures,” he told me. “But I felt I was treated in a pretty shoddy way.”
My dad even tried to ask for some help from rescuers when the dust started bothering him. He approached a firefighter he had seen distributing masks to other rescue workers. “I asked him, ‘Do you have an extra mask?’ and he said, ‘No, we don’t have any,'” my dad recounted.
My dad watched in disbelief when, moments later, a National Guardsman walked up to the same firefighter and asked for a mask. The Guardsman was handed one without hesitation.
My dad was stunned. “I was just doing my job, too.”
A doctor nearby saw the whole exchange and came up to my dad, pulling a mask out of his pocket. “The doctor said, ‘I’m sorry I used it a little bit but you can have this one.’ He gave it to me and I thanked him,” my dad told me. “It was the kindest thing anyone did for me when I was there.”
My dad struggles with how he felt he was treated by city officials and rescuers. “I think there was a racial thing,” he noted. “I’m Oriental [my dad also has a thick Japanese accent]. I’m from a Philly paper. I felt like I got a lot of ‘what are you doing here’ – that kind of attitude.”
Without being able to get close to Ground Zero, my dad focused on the surrounding scenes.
“I couldn’t even lift my camera.”
“Mostly I photographed people’s reactions, human interest stuff: people looking for lost relative, makeshift memorials, vigils,” my dad said. “I wanted to get the rescue effort.”
Friends and relatives of victims and the missing would come up to my dad on the street. They’d see his camera and press badge and ask him, “Did you see this person? Do you know what’s going on?” Time after time, my dad didn’t have answers. But these people were nice to him and didn’t mind being photographed.
My dad remembers very distinctly interacting with one of these people on the street, even ten years later.
“One particular girl was walking by holding a picture, I don’t know if it was her friend or boyfriend. She bumped into me,” my dad recalled.
“She asked me if I’d seen this person; she was almost crying. I didn’t know if I had. I was so moved by the way she asked I couldn’t even lift my camera. I completely forgot I had my camera. I felt so bad for her.”
He continued, “After she walked away, I realized I had missed a good opportunity to shoot, so I tried not to involve feeling for the subject anymore.”
“You become pretty numb.”
My dad stayed in New York City for a week covering the 9/11 aftermath. He was joined by a team of photographers and reporters from The Inquirer, staying in a hotel on 5th Avenue.
He remembers how hard it was to find lunch. “Everything was closed. You had to go uptown to eat.”
In his career, my dad has seen a lot through the lens. Whether it was covering Three Mile Island (for which The Inquirer won the Pulitzer in 1980), bloody battle imagery in the 1991 Iraq War, photographing Quadafi in Libya for a month in the 80s or even covering the fall of the Berlin Wall: 9/11 was no different in the intensity of his assignment.
“I’m glad I contributed to spread this news story for the paper and its readers,” he said to me.
But it was hardly a walk in the park and my dad struggled emotionally with covering 9/11.
“I felt so bad about what was going on,” he said. “You see this kind of stuff, seen tragedy in my career, and you become pretty numb. It’s not good, but it’s the nature of the business. I felt bad about so many people dying.”
My dad didn’t have the luxury of dwelling on the emotional impact of what had just happened to our country, to these individual people and lives. “Otherwise I can’t take pictures,” he said. “I try to block off all those feelings. When I got back to the hotel each night I felt really depressed and wondered if I should have covered this.”
I was shocked at what my dad said next.
“Maybe I’m too cold, but I have to be. Otherwise, if I start thinking about any kind of tragedy, I just can’t cover it.”
I’ve never heard my dad ever speak so candidly of how he’s been affected by his work.
He continued, “Sometimes it affects me later on.”
“A more peace-loving people.”
My mom tells me that my dad doesn’t handle the anniversary of 9/11 very well. He doesn’t like to talk about it. The fact that he allowed me to talk to him for nearly and hour and a half about that day was a big deal.
When I asked him how he felt on the tenth anniversary, he had this to say:
“Death is death no matter which way you go.” (My dad can be a truly blunt man sometimes.) “Tragedy happens all over the world. We should have compassion for other people too.”
For my dad, he feels the anniversary of 9/11 should provide everyone the opportunity to think and reflect for others who have faced tragedy around the globe. My dad believes thinking of others “makes us a more peace-loving people. It’s important to memorialize but it’s also reminds to me to look at the bigger scope of global tragedy.”
“Maybe that was one of the good things…”
My dad never got close to Ground Zero. The closest he ever came was about 2 blocks away, before officials shooed him away again. He only ever spent about 3 to 4 hours a day focused on trying to get shots near Ground Zero, usually at a distance of about 4 to 5 blocks away.
“As soon as I got back to the hotel every night, I got into the shower and washed everything,” he says.
In retrospect, he’s glad he didn’t spend so much time at Ground Zero because thankfully, he hasn’t developed the health problems that many of the first responders have in the decade since. “Maybe that was one of the good things that happened to me,” he thinks.
Still, my dad is registered on the World Trade Center Health Registry just to be safe.
For as much as my dad wanted to get shots close to Ground Zero, he had to get creative. He decided to try and get some shots from higher ground. On September 13, he came up with an idea. He went to Rockefeller Center up to the 65th floor to the Rainbow Room restaurant.
“I spoke to the manager and asked if I could shoot at dusk from their windows, so I could get the Empire State Building – now illuminated in red, white, and blue lights – while Ground Zero could be seen smoldering in the background,” he told me. The manager agreed and about two hours later, my dad came back, camera in hand.
He got his only shot of Ground Zero.
Of all the thousands of images he took that week, the haunting photo of this new New York skyline at dusk was my dad’s favorite photograph.
It was never published.
. . .
“The images are so stark sometimes that people tend to think that there’s a machine behind the camera, and that’s not the case.
We are all human beings.
The things that we see go through the eye straight into the brain. Some of those scenes never go away.”
– Joao Silva
. . .
Thank you, Papa, for sharing your story of 9/11 with me. I know I’ll never forget this conversation and I know we will all never forget that day.
Peace and blessings to everyone as we remember 9/11.
Wow, just read this, great read. Recently I have stopped going to the annual press photography exhibition as I find it quite shocking and gory. I have struggled with the concept of people’s shock and grief being captured on film at times like this. I do appreciate this is someone’s job and the story behind it, of a real person and their thoughts and memories around, helps with that somehow. I could not do that job.
Thanks to you and your dad for sharing his story.
Akira Suwa, thank you so much for sharing your story with us … and for your lens, for another perspective on tragedy. I love that picture … there is something almost ghostly about it, and yet, so beautiful … reminding us that life goes on.
This is a very moving 1st person account. Thanks to your father for sharing his story, and you for telling it.
What a touching story, Keiko. Thank you for sharing.
What a gift this was, to have your father relate those emotions for and to you. To see that day from the point of view of a photographer was truly special, so many things and emotions to sift through. Thank u so much for sharing this interview with us
I have mixed feelings about 9/11 and this makes me feel so sad. I applaud your dad for staying a professional and you for sharing.
-r
Please extend my sincere thanks to your father for sharing his story and for putting his own well-being on the line to be able to share these images with the world. Most people recognize the most obvious heroes in these situations – the firefighters, the police, the military – but, sadly, I think we often forget about the people behind the cameras who record and share these historical moments. Thank you.
Wow Keiko. What a powerful and moving post. I got chills reading it. Thank you for reaching out to your dad and thank you to him for being willing to share. I appreciate the opportunity, ten years later, to read and learn about the different experiences and perspectives of my fellow Americans on 9/11/01 and since. I am sorry to hear that your father was treated that way, when he was just trying to do his job. That picture is truly awesome. Wishing you, your father and all those touched by 9/11 peace and comfort on this 10th Anniversary of that fateful day in our nation’s history.
Wow, what a truly phenomenal recounting of 9/11 and the aftermath. That is one of the most amazing pictures I have seen. Thank you for sharing your dad’s story and his picture with us. It means a lot.
This is one of the most powerful 9/11 pieces that I’ve ever read. I think both you and your father for sharing this with the world.
Wow. Just… wow.
Really interesting story, Keiko and yet another thing we have in common: my dad was a reporter and columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and covered terrible stories like Jonestown (he was supposed to be on that flight of journalists and congressmen who were attacked), airplane crashes, school bus crashes, earthquakes, the Zodiac killings (he made the I’m not Paul Avery pins, and wore one).
I really appreciated the insight on how your dad approaches his job. It was insightful both personally and from the view of a citizen: we need witnesses to these events.
And that photo is haunting.
This is extremely moving and beautiful. I love the photograph. I see why it’s one of his favourite. I would love to see some of the others he took that day. Please tell your father thank-you for being so willing to talk and share his story. I, for one, appreciate it greatly.
Powerful post, Keiko. Thank you for sharing your father’s story with your readers. That picture of NYC is entrancing – beautiful and yet so sad.