And when it hit, again it made this incredible beyond movie theatre sound. “I waited until it hit,” he says, “and when it hit I had no idea, but I thought something would occur. In that horrific moment, Owerko shot two frames with his Fuji 645zi medium format camera in hand.
It was a very predatory move and having just spent a month in Africa it was like watching a cheetah going into stalk mode.” The plane did this little shoulder shrug where it dipped its wing and when I saw it arc, then I knew its intention. “I heard the sound of this jet,” he says, “and I thought it was air traffic being redirected. Unknowingly the second plane began to approach the towers. “Because Tanzania I had a 400mm lens in my bag and I switched my 35 and I started photographing these people in the last moments of their lives.” “Someone said there’s people jumping and that’s when the temperature really changed and the crowd began reacting in horror,” Owerko remembers. “The reason I went to Vesey and Church streets was that it put the sun at my back and I was able to compose a story of the two towers – one that was obfuscated and one with no marring on it and at that point I thought: ‘There’s your cover.’ The one tower that’s smoking and the one that’s stoic and defiant.”Īt that moment, people started screaming. “There was a lull for a few minutes,” he remembers. And being judicious about what you shot and even being conservative.” Owerko quickly strategized his photos and carefully moved around the streets to find the best perspective. “There was kind of a beauty to working back then,” he says. In a time right before most photographers switched to digital cameras, Owerko was equipped with a 35mm and a medium format Fuji 645zi film cameras. “I remember people chuckling at me and saying ‘where’s the fire buddy?’ as I ran with two cameras and a bag strapped around me.” “Things were still normal at the moment,” he says. He ran down Broadway and then crossed over on Chambers Street and immediately started taking photos. On the way out, his building’s superintendent told him that he saw a plane hit the tower. Owerko’s camera bag with all of his gear was still packed and ready to go beside his door as he ran out of his apartment to investigate. There is no way I can describe what it sounded like.” Conjuring a scene from the film King Kong where the monster is terrorizing New York, Owerko recalls, “It sounded like a gorilla threw a city bus at a building. That sound was the impact of an American Airlines jet hitting the World Trade Center’s north tower. On the morning of September 11, 2001, photographer Lyle Owerko remembers being jetlagged and unable to sleep in his Tribeca apartment when he heard a sound that defied description.
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