User:Noahcs/Fairbanks video

The Fairbanks video (also referred to as the Evan Fairbanks video) was a 26 minutes video taken by freelance photographer on September 11th, 2001.

New York Times
At first it looked like snow. There was a stillness in the city. White dust floated in the air. People looked up to see where it was coming from. The traffic was moving slowly. Then people started running, running north and running east. It was around 9 in the morning on Sept. 11.

The man who was recording the events with his video camera, Evan Fairbanks, had just emerged from Trinity Church, where he was videotaping the archbishop of Wales. He came out in time to photograph the paper snow. On the street, people were dialing their cellphones again and again to tell their someones the news. They were looking up at a white plume of smoke. Against a crack of blue sky just above the American Stock Exchange you could see the source of the strange weather. One of the towers of the World Trade Center was on fire. And things were remarkably calm.

Mr. Fairbanks has made a Zapruder film for our time. His camera is there but always seems just a second or two behind the events. He doesn't know what he is photographing. How could he? And he certainly doesn't know what it will look like in retrospect. He has no idea of the things that people will know when they finally do watch it.

His videotape, 25 stunning, silent minutes being shown on an endless loop at The New-York Historical Society, is just one part of the exhibition New York Sept. 11 by Magnum Photographers. As it happened a lot of photographers from the Magnum agency were in New York that day, including Paul Fusco, Thomas Hoepker, Steve McCurry, Susan Meiselas, Gilles Peress, Larry Towell and Alex Webb, because their annual meeting was the night before at the agency's office in Chelsea. The bulk of the exhibition at the historical society, on view until Feb. 25, is their photographs and written reminiscences of the disaster, as well as some pictures of the World Trade Center taken long before Sept. 11.

Mr. McCurry captured the plumes and geysers from the crashing towers and then the terrible aftermath. One of his pictures shows a line of firefighters, with yellow stripes on their jackets and pants, threading their way through the new gray world, clutching a long fire hose like children linked together on a leash for a school trip.

Ms. Meiselas caught the stampede of frightened people running through the streets as the cloud of one collapsed building thundered close behind. Mr. Webb caught masked Manhattanites in the rubble. Mr. Hoepker captured the golden and black sky over the Brooklyn Bridge. Mr. Towell photographed a dazed man in the desolate street reading a single sheet of paper from the debris as if it were poetry. Mr. Peress caught the dust.

The Magnum photographers' still pictures are awful in their gorgeousness. But they cannot compare with Mr. Fairbanks's shaky videotape. And there is a simple reason.

Mr. Fairbanks, who is not a Magnum photographer, caught the events before anyone knew what they would mean. He saw the very climate changing minute by minute. His tape is not only a record of the events unwinding; it also defines the moment just before everything changed: firemen, police officers, cellphones, office papers, orderly evacuations, flags, the American Stock Exchange, blue skies.

The video shows people pointing up at the sky after the first building has been hit. A New York City Fire Department ambulance rumbles down the street. One man in a T-shirt is outside Steve's Pizza yelling and gesticulating madly, showing with his hands what the fireball looked like when the plane hit. He looks oddly out of place, like a street preacher talking about the end of the world.

Some people are smiling, the way people might smile at a monster truck rally. People are leaning on cars. They are getting comfortable with a new, slightly modified reality. Looking up toward the World Trade Center, you can see that it is wounded, but certainly not mortally. An F.B.I. agent is writing something on the hood of a car. A black ribbon blows in the air. It isn't yet an omen.

Then a long, long moment changes everything. Over the head of the F.B.I. agent, who clearly does not see what is happening, a plane silently penetrates the other World Trade Center tower. The man's head reels out of the frame as he reacts to the crash. His head snaps back in time to watch the aftermath. A black cloud envelops the tower. Debris sprays out like a fountain from the top. The sky goes dark. The traffic stops.

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And the weather shifts completely. It is no longer a gentle snow, but a tornado outside. Papers the size of newspapers are blowing everywhere. A man's shadow runs and throws down a briefcase near a wall. The camera gazes at the wall, then focuses on a cellphone. The neighborhood is dark and deserted.

Firefighters start marching toward the tower with oxygen tanks. The street sign blinks Don't walk. They are marching very, very slowly. You wish they would go faster -- or stop. Some look worried. But what do they have to worry about? The buildings they are marching to still look sturdy. The camera follows them into the World Trade Center. People are emerging from the bottom of the building without panic. They wave to their friends. The sun streams in. Everything will be O.K.

Then the camera goes down to the Emergency Control Center in the basement of the World Trade Center. The room is ordinary, ugly and bureaucratic looking. Men stand around arguing about strategy, as if it were just another power struggle. There is an American flag on the wall. The camera and the cameraman leave the building for the last time. The camera catches sight of the Port Authority police station. The black cloud at the top of the tower begins to descend, faster faster faster. The world shakes. And everything goes black.

tobybarraud.com
...A little earlier in the day one of KSK’s cameramen, Evan Fairbanks, had burst into the offices, white with dust and escorted by two FBI agents. All three men were visibly shaken. Evan had been shooting beneath the Towers and had footage of the second aircraft striking the south Tower. A dub was made of the footage and given to the agents, then Evan took the master copy to ABC News. Warner said I should come up and see the footage. The streets of Manhattan were empty of traffic except for speeding cop cars and black Suburban trucks. The military had moved in and fully armed soldiers manned intersections even past 14th Street. An F-16 jetfighter would periodically cruise overhead. Behind the intense defense presence civilians filled the sidewalks. People stood in the street talking with strangers and many bars were filled to capacity. The scene reminded me of a day in the previous winter when heavy snow had brought the city to a standstill. For one day the city was blanketed, halting traffic and absorbing noise. People left work and a distinct feeling of fellowship and community could be felt in the streets. It was that same feeling as I made my way back toward midtown. People walked their dogs, pushed baby carriages, wore sunglasses and smiled at each other. Warner and I sat down in the editing suite and he ran Evan’s tape. Of the three different shots used by the major American news networks to show the impact of the second aircraft, Evan’s was by far the closest. He later described himself as the “luckiest man of the whole day".

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Evan had been in Trinity Church preparing to shoot a speech by the Archbishop of Wales when the production manager ran into the church and reported the first plane’s collision. Evan ran to a window and saw what looked to him like a Yankee parade – a rain of shredded paper. Grabbing a video camera Evan ran out into the street, where people stood, staring out. The mood in the streets was one of “surreal numbing calm”. When the second plane struck Evan was rolling on the Tower. It looked to him as though the plane had flown into a, “three floor hanger cut out of the building”. The impact was whisper quiet, followed by a low, distant rumble and then a rain of debris. Evan ran and lay under a car until he felt it was safe, and then proceeded shooting again. When the first plane had struck Evan had been bewildered by the magnitude of the disaster. His shock was compounded exponentially by the second plane. At each event people assumed the worst had struck. When the south Tower began collapsing, proving them all wrong, Evan was still shooting from the immediate area. He captured the building peeling down on itself like a steel banana, then he ran again, somehow managing to shoot at the same time, unknowingly capturing his own shadow. (Friends who hadn’t spoken to him recognised his shadow when the footage was first aired). As the burgeoning cloud of smoke and ash caught him he rolled under a heavy vehicle. "I thought the most intense thing I would see in my life", he told me later, "was the birth of my children. And now that’s not true." The noises were high pitched: the tinkling of glass and shredded steel. Dust filled the air and blocked out light. Evan felt himself unable to breathe. His first thought was to record a message for his children, but on second consideration he decided to attempt moving out. He got himself out from under the vehicle found he could breathe a little easier. Visibility was dismal. He walked a short distance before deciding it was the wrong direction, then set off the other way. Evan eventually found himself in the offices of the FBI at 99 Church St, only four blocks from the flaming north Tower. Almost 30 minutes after nearly being buried in the rubble of the south Tower, Evan watched the north Tower collapse. "It looked like a cheap miniature model from some cheap film", he said, "It was a non-event because it didn’t fall down on my head." When the Towers were being constructed in1975 Evan had been 14-years-old. He remembers going up to the 86th floor, where construction was still underway, and looking out over the city, mesmerised. Evan could scarcely have been closer to the calamity and survived, but his closeness to it had not saved him from feelings of incomprehension we felt at our safe distances. "You just couldn’t connect", he said, "That what was happening had any relation to you."

Greenwich Village Gazette
New York September 11 by Magnum Photographers

"I was a boy scout in 1972," he said, "when my troop visited the newly-constructed World Trade Center. I remember looking out from the 86th floor. I was impressed."

Evan Fairbanks, now a freelance photographer, was on the stage at the New York Historical society, narrating his 25-minute silent video, which he shot almost thirty years later, on September 11, 2001. He's solidly built, with thick light brown hair falling in waves to the nape of his neck and he seemed nervous in front of the audience of more than 300 people. He told us he often works in lower Manhattan, and, that morning, he was at Trinity Church, setting up a teleconference with the Archbishop of Wales. All of a sudden, the lights flickered in the studio. When he ran to the window, he saw there had been an explosion at the WTC.

"Someone handed me a video camera and I ran outside," he said. "And it was only after the first tower collapsed and FBI agents conducted me to a safe place, that I stopped shooting. When I told them what I had on videotaped, they brought me to their command center. They have the original, which has five minutes of audio. This is a copy. Sorry there's no sound." The lights then dimmed and his video came on the screen. It was shaky, with washed out color, and there was an edge of upset in his voice as he again re-lived what was on the tape. Surprisingly, at the very beginning, people in the street weren't running. Some of them were looking up at the WTC and others looked like they were simply just going to their next appointment.

There are some shots of someone listening to a portable radio, and looking up at the WTC in disbelief. There are people looking up, curious, wondering what was going on. There's a shot of a man standing there looking up and calmly eating a donut. There are shots in front of a firehouse, and firemen also looking up in wonder. "I knew this was something big," he said, "when I saw the falling debris".

He kept moving closer as other people were walking away. "I felt it was my obligation to keep shooting," he said. The camera was focused on the smoke in the tower and he remembered thinking that it was some sort of an accident and there certainly wouldn't be any more. And, at that very moment there is a good shot of the second plane going through the next tower. There was a gasp from the audience then and I felt my own heart give a little lurch.

That's when the smoke intensified. That's when the sky was filled with debris. That's when people started to run.

The camera shakes as it keeps focused on the towers but there are spots when it goes out of focus. Mr. Fairbanks said he took cover under a parked fire engine and held his camera outside pointed at the towers. He thought he was going to die, thought of recording his last words into the camera as a final goodbye to his wife and children, especially when he realized that the heavy tires of the fire engine would have collapsed if a lot of debris fell on it, thus crushing him to death.

And so he decided to run for it but kept his camera over his shoulder pointed behind him at the WTC as he ran.

There are then some shots of Port Authority agents and the FBI as he was taken to a command center with his camera, and continued filming firefighters and other rescue personnel as well as people exiting from the buildings. One of the first fire-fighting companies on the scene came from Maspeth, Queens. They didn't even wait for an order; they heard about the tragedy and were there within minutes. Every one of them was lost.

I've seen so many films of the incident on television but they were all edited. This was raw footage, with mistakes and all. And it was interesting to hear Mr. Fairbanks talk about all the things that were wrong with the film technically, because he was just too scared to get the audio or the focus right. And there are some parts when he didn't know the camera was on and all you can see are feet or smoke or just darkness. No doubt this was real. And here was a real person standing in front of us who had taken the film and lived to tell about it.

Later, I went in to the see the rest of the exhibit, which is entitled "New York September 11 by Magnum Photographers" and will be at the New York Historical Society until February 25. Here, the same video I had seen in the auditorium was showing on a loop. Here, however, the film had been colorized; the copy we saw in the auditorium was primarily in black and white. Also, this second film had been edited, with all those dead spots removed. I watched it for a while, watching again the shot of the second plane going through the second tower. Then I slowly went through the rest of the exhibit of still photography.

Some of these photos were of the WTC taken at other times. One particularly good one was taken in from New Jersey in 1986 with the Statue of Liberty in the foreground. But most were of that awful day and the aftermath. There's a life-size statue of a man opening a briefcase called 'Double Check" in Liberty Park and an excellent photo shows it covered with debris. There a photo of the WTC ablaze while people scurried across the Brooklyn Bridge that day. There's a photo a woman with a baby taken from a rooftop in Brooklyn with the fires raging at the WTC across the way.

It was all brought back with gruesome reality.