The apartment building I lived in caught fire a year and a half ago. I remember being out the back as the firemen arrived, taking videos and sending photos to my friends saying "Fuck's sake I just want to get back to bed!" thinking it would all be over and done with in an hour or so. It was only when the roof went up that it hit home that i wasn't going to be sleeping in my bed for a long, long time. Hopefully I'll be back in there for the 2nd anniversary of the fire starting next March... I think when you see stuff on fire there is a tendency not to realise how bad it is till it really escalates. This photo, from the distance they're at, it probably just looked like a bad fire and it was probably only when the buildings fell that it really hit home.
I once saw a guy covered head to toe in blood, seconds from throwing himself off a freeway. Somehow I just... didn't register what I was seeing. It was too absurd, too horrifying, I literally thought it was a religious cosplay or a performance art piece or something. I debated whether the cops needed to be called or not for a decently long while - until the second the guy started to go over the barrier. He was grabbed by a good Samaritan and lived, thankfully. But I'll never forget the way my brain short circuited and completely failed to recognise the danger. It was like a stack overflow error, like the amount of warning signs was too great and it just looped back into being none at all. Human brains are weird in crisis situations.
They say how this happens all the time in plane crashes where people are still alive and able to move but freeze and won’t leave the plane when they can and end up dying because they get trapped as the flames spread.
Actually the subjects in this photo were reported to be quite alarmed by what they were seeing. It is one of those pictures that is taken out of context.
其实有报道说照片里的那几个人当时看着挺慌的。这照片只是被断章取义了而已。
Bureaucratic_Dick33 赞2025/9/26
Last year, I was flying home from LA, and we saw the LA fires happening. Obviously with the smoke we knew it was a fire, and with a lot of it, we were just like “Wow that looks like a bigger fire…hope they get it put out quickly!” but we couldn’t comprehend how big. We had been back on US soil following a 15 hour flight for long enough to rush through customs, rush to our next gate, check our bags, and stand at our boarding terminal for a few minutes. We didn’t check the news on our phones before we boarded, and it was at the start of the fires, so idk if it was even in the news yet, but it definitely was by the time we landed. Without instant information it’s hard to comprehend the magnitude of what you’re seeing as you see it in real time.
Yeah, even when I was seeing it on TV, it was bad, but even when the first plane hit, I remember thinking “oh, this will be like the first time. Everyone will get out. It’ll be okay.” And even after the second plane hit, I still never thought that BOTH buildings were going to collapse. It was only after we found out that a plane had hit the Pentagon and the other crashed in Pennsylvania that we realized there was something REALLY wrong.
I remember being down at ground zero at around 9/15/01 and looking at this massive pile, shards of rubble that were building sized, like a tremendous horrible iceberg. Looking back its hard to imagine i could have comprehend what i was looking at. As I write this i realize it still is hard. I remember my mother and were the only ones curious enough in the family to try to get close. I remember being in a small group of people on the stanchioned off sidewalk trying to get a good view about a block away. All the shops shut many of them filled with dust, parked cars were covered. And i remember the smell, carrying as far as canal street. Months later you could smell it, but it evolved to smell like burnt ramen.
I couldn’t bring myself to visit the site for 10 years after it happened. The energy in the air even 10 years later, was palpable to me. So much distruction and death.
When I first saw it on tv I was walking through the lounge in my dorm. I looked up, thought “oh how sad, some building caught on fire” and then walked away. We really didn’t grasp the magnitude of what happened at first
I was their age during that period and every time I see old pictures like this one, I have to remind myself and reprogram my brain to think about how the world did not look like what the picture portrays. The orange overcast, vintage film grain, washed out colors in these old photos is not what I experienced. What I experienced and what I saw is exactly the colors my eyes see right now in 2025. I look at old middle school photos from 1995 and I constantly have to remind myself of this lol. I'm like what, damn the chairs never looked that old when I was experiencing it.
That's revisionist, film grain and orange overcast reality was considered a *colossal* advancement at the time over the trippy 70s greens and perma slowmo that preceded it, and the black and white, muffled audio world before that.
There was nothing they could do about it so they sat there and watched and talked. Nothing wrong with that.
当时那种情况他们根本无能为力,所以坐在那儿看、在那儿聊,没啥毛病。
spartag00se33 赞2025/9/26
Absolutely. The mundane parts of our lives never really go away even on a day like this.
绝对是这样。即便是在那种日子里,生活里琐碎日常的一面也从未真正消失过。
Walrus_Deep63 赞2025/9/26
I was there in lower Manhattan, very close to Ground Zero when the planes hit and of course it was a panic stricken moment for all of us but if you were across the water in Williamsburg they would not be as panicked but would be discussing the updates such as they were from news media since cellular communication was down that day. This is a real photograph taken by a German photographer that morning.
I highly disagree with the immediate analysis of the moment depicted even from the photographer himself, but I think it demonstrates the sensitivity in the immediate years surrounding the event. Even the need for two of the individuals to come forward to say they were discussing the events and the criticism from the NYT seems unnecessary. To me, the people depicted are not disinterested but rather like much of America helpless. I remember many of my friends including me wanting to do something that day. But what? I live about 1,500 miles away from New York but I felt so much anger and sadness and confusion. To me, this picture captures those feelings powerfully. Here they are, just on the other side of the East River and what are they to do? Thank you for sharing!
The last day of a very different world. Insane photo.
一个截然不同的世界的最后一天。太震撼的照片了。
cmlambert8910 赞2025/9/25
The day the 90s ended
90年代终结的那一天。
coffeequeen05237 赞2025/9/25
存档
superloverr6 赞2025/9/25
The 24/7 newstream that we have now wasn't really a thing back then. We would have had to physically been in front of a TV with "breaking news" to know what exactly was going on, otherwise it was word of mouth and evening news/newspapers. They probably only knew the planes had hit and nothing more...
My husband was a high school teenager that day and actually witnessed the collapse from a rooftop in Williamsburg with some friends. Most people living in NYC had no idea of the significance of what they were seeing in the early hours.