The Art That 9/11 Made

On 11 September 2001, the Associated Press photographer Richard Drew stood beneath the World Trade Center and photographed people falling from the burning towers.

One frame, showing a man almost perfectly aligned with the vertical architecture behind him, became known as The Falling Man. It remains one of the defining images of the attacks, but also one of the most difficult: a photograph of the split seconds before a man’s death. The identity of the man remains unknown.

The image was published in newspapers throughout the world the next day. Yet it soon went out of circulation; the image was too upsetting. In the September 2003 issue of Esquire, the author Tom Junod published “The Falling Man”.

“He departs from this earth like an arrow,” Junod wrote. “If he were not falling, he might very well be flying.” 

Junod dismantles what the photograph seems to tell us. Drew’s contact sheet shows a sequence of nine photographs of the man. In the other frames, he is tumbling chaotically through the air. A photograph can turn a fraction of a second into something that appears definitive, while concealing everything that comes before or after it. “Photographs lie,” Junod writes. “Even great photographs. Especially great photographs.” 

The image eventually entered the collection of the British pop star Sir Elton John, who spent two years trying to acquire an original print. What he eventually paid has never been disclosed. “It’s the most beautiful image of something so tragic,” John told CBS News in 2016. “It’s probably one of the most perfect photographs ever taken.” He has never hung it on his wall.

Elton John's response catches something uncomfortable about the visual legacy of 9/11. Terror and beauty can occupy the same image. Photographs created as documents were also compositions, governed and defined by timing, framing and colour.

To call The Falling Man beautiful is to sound grotesque. Yet, in the same moment, to deny its aesthetic power is to overlook the formal precision that has enabled it to endure. Over time, it has come to embody the experience of watching that day from afar.

Thomas Hoepker, View from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Manhattan, 9/11/2001. © Thomas Hoepker / Magnum Photos

A Profound State of Disbelief

Another famous photograph taken that day captured a different complexity that seems distinct to 9/11: how easily an image can become contested.

The German photographer Thomas Hoepker, who died aged 88 in July 2024, photographed five people sitting beside the Brooklyn waterfront in bright September sunshine. He called the image View From Williamsburg, Brooklyn, on Manhattan, 9/11.

Across the East River, smoke billows from Lower Manhattan. The group appears almost offensively relaxed. The water glistens with the sun, there are bicycles and greenery, and the group seems locked in easy conversation. Their poses and gestures are casual. Some appear to be laughing.

Hoepker did not publish the picture in the immediate aftermath. When he began to circulate it five years later, its incongruity made it world-famous.

Writing in his column Whatever Happened to the America of 9/12? for The New York Times, the essayist Frank Rich wrote: “What [Hoepker] caught was this: Traumatic as the attack on America was, 9/11 would recede quickly for many. This is a country that likes to move on, and fast.”

The people in the image profoundly objected to that reading. Walter Sipser, pictured on the right, said the group had gathered after watching the towers collapse and were discussing what had happened. They were, he said, in “a profound state of shock and disbelief”.

Nothing in Hoepker’s frame was necessarily false. The people were there. The towers were burning behind them. Their expressions looked as the camera recorded them. Yet the meaning imposed on that fraction of a second caught something as true and enduring as The Falling Man.

Philip Seymour Hoffman's character Jacob looking out over Ground Zero in 25th Hour (2002), directed by Spike Lee. © 2002 Touchstone Pictures

Culture as Mass Consciousness

“Every age gets the art it deserves, and every age must accept the art it gets.” T. S. Eliot wrote these words in his preface to Anne Ridler’s A Little Book of Modern Verse, published in 1941.

For the generation that came of age after 2001, art was indelibly shaped by the spectacle of 9/11. The attacks were experienced through footage endlessly replayed on rolling news: the aircraft exploding into the buildings, the streets engulfed in clouds of dust, the towers seeming to concertina as they collapsed. They soon became a set of motifs – detached from the moments in which they were made, and soon reworked by an American popular culture acting like a mass consciousness, trying to process what had just happened.

Spike Lee’s 25th Hour, released in 2002, was the first major American feature film to be shot in New York after the attacks. The source novel by David Benioff (who went on to write the screenplay for Game of Thrones) was published many years before, but Lee refused to change the film’s location. Nor did he pretend the city was unchanged.

Edward Norton’s drug dealer spends his final day of freedom moving through a New York filled with flags, memorials and grief. In one pivotal scene, his friends Frank and Jacob, played by Barry Pepper and Philip Seymour Hoffman, talk in front of a window overlooking the actual wreckage of Ground Zero. 9/11 is not the plot, but it becomes the atmosphere in which the plot takes place.

Three years later, Steven Spielberg’s Munich connected the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics and the subsequent Israeli campaign against those believed responsible to the post-9/11 present. In the opening act of the film, Lynn Cohen’s character Golda Meir says: “Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values.”

Spielberg made the connection explicit in the film’s final shot, which places the Twin Towers on the Manhattan skyline behind its protagonist.

Its central question has only become more prescient: what happens when the response to terrorism becomes a cycle of violence of its own? Revenge, targeted killing and the costs of counterterrorism complicate any simple division between hero and villain. Since the attacks, the United States has waged wars or conducted military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Lebanon and, most recently, Iran.

Zero Dark Thirty (2012), directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Photograph: Jonathan Olley/AP

Permanent Emergency

Children of Men was released in 2006. By this point, 9/11 no longer needs to be visible. Alfonso Cuarón’s London of 2027 is battered by terrorist attacks and governed by surveillance, propaganda and militarised borders. Refugees are rounded up and transported to camps in cages. Bombs explode without warning. The government presents a permanent emergency as the price of maintaining order.

There were echoes of an older cinematic tradition. During the Cold War, fears of infiltration, nuclear destruction and ideological enemies are laced through popular films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Dr. Strangelove (1964). After 9/11, surveillance, suspicion and the possibility of an unwarned attack in any ordinary public place became similarly familiar features of cinema.

Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, released in 2012, was the first film to deal seriously with the apparatus created in the attacks’ aftermath.

Against a black screen, the film opens with an opera of voices recorded on the morning of 9/11. It then moves into the CIA’s hunt for Osama bin Laden: black sites, waterboarding, surveillance and, finally, the raid in Abbottabad, deep in the heartlands of Pakistan, in which al-Qaeda's leader was assassinated.

The controversy over whether the film legitimised torture was central to its reception. So was its unusually close access to CIA officials during its research and production. But the discourse around the film succeeded in shifting the argument: from what had been done to America to what America had done in response.

Eric Fischl, Tumbling Woman, 2002. © Eric Fischl / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, courtesy Whitney

An Event Buried Beneath Imagery

For visual artists, the problem was different: how do you represent an event already buried beneath images?

Working within a year of the attacks, the American painter Eric Fischl, best known for his depictions of American suburbia, was among the first prominent artists to engage directly with 9/11. His bronze sculpture Tumbling Woman (2002) immediately went where photography could not. It appeared to capture a woman at the moment of impact with the pavement.

Its presence provoked an immediate and furious backlash when shown at Rockefeller Center. Placed beside Drew’s photograph of The Falling Man, the sculpture exposed an uncomfortable boundary between each medium: images of burning buildings and falling bodies could circulate around the world, but the bodily reality of those deaths, given three-dimensional form, proved too much to accommodate. The sculpture was removed after only a few days.

Xu Bing dispensed with representation altogether. For Where Does the Dust Itself Collect? (2004), the Chinese-American artist used dust gathered from the streets of Lower Manhattan after the attacks: pulverised concrete, glass and steel reduced to a fine, grey residue. Spread across the floor of an empty storefront near Madison Square Park and later exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum as part of the 2017 exhibition Art and China after 1989, the dust was inscribed with a Buddhist couplet: “As there is nothing from the first, where does the dust itself collect?” The collapsing towers had become detritus. The catastrophe could be gathered with a dustpan and brush and turned into art.

It was left to Gerhard Richter, perhaps the greatest artist alive, to create the defining 9/11 work of those early years after the attack. He created September in 2005, yet the image is unusually small compared with the monumental scale of many of his paintings. The burning World Trade Center is blurred and scraped until it almost disappears. Rather than compete with the clarity and repetition of news photography, Richter made the familiar image difficult to see. Memories fade, and September sought to wrestle with that universal truth.

Xu Bing, Where Does the Dust Itself Collect?, 2004. Courtesy the artist © Xu Bing. Photo: Xu Bing, courtesy Xu Bing Studio / Guggenheim

Circulation and Circularity

The rendering of 9/11 was not contained in museums. It entered the market too.

Richter’s original September was donated to the Museum of Modern Art. But, in 2009, Richter produced an edition based on the painting which sold at Phillips for £106,250.

Richter influenced a generation of artists grappling with the afterlife of 9/11. One such is Thomas Ruff, the German photographer who studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf during Richter's tenure as a professor. 

Ruff made the circulation of images the subject itself. He was in New York on the day of the attacks and took numerous photographs, only to discover after returning to Germany that no images had been recorded. Three years later, he began sourcing photographs of 9/11 from the internet.

For his jpegs ny works, initiated in 2004, Ruff enlarged and manipulated low-resolution files until their digital compression became conspicuous. Ruff focused on how such images travelled: copied, compressed, enlarged and consumed across newspapers, television and, a little more than a decade before the true birth of social media, the internet.

Twenty-five years after the attacks, those works are now being presented through some of contemporary art’s most powerful gallerists. David Zwirner showed 12 of Ruff’s 9/11 photographs at Art Basel Unlimited in June. The same group is now the subject of Thomas Ruff: jpegs ny at Zwirner’s West 19th Street gallery in New York, opening this week to coincide with the anniversary.

Avery Singer 'Free Fall.' Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

A War in My Neighbourhood

The American artist Avery Singer takes the story into another era.

Singer celebrated her 14th birthday with her parents on 10 September 2001. The following morning, from her family’s apartment in Tribeca, she saw the North Tower burning. Her family slept in the projection room of Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art that night. “I hadn’t, at that point, really thought about the world in the framework of geopolitical struggles,” she told The Art Journal in a recent interview in Zurich. “I thought I was lucky, being born in America. We don’t have wars. Then suddenly I was in a war one day in my neighbourhood.”

More than 20 years later, her 2023 Hauser & Wirth exhibition Free Fall reconstructed that childhood encounter through paintings and architectural interventions, including a reconstruction of the lobby and elevators of the Twin Towers, where her mother had once worked as an office clerk. Singer has described the work in terms of a “war of images”: how photographs, films and digital pictures shape memories to such a degree that lived experience becomes difficult to separate from its representation.

The work also entered the global art market. At Frieze Seoul in 2024, Hauser & Wirth reported selling Singer’s Free Fall for $575,000.

A Beautiful Image of Something So Tragic

Richard Drew’s photograph of the falling man – “the most beautiful image of something so tragic” – remains intensely powerful. Its beauty did not make the man’s death less real, nor can the reality of his death erase the photograph’s formal force, its geometric quality, its overwhelming synergy. “One of the most famous photographs in human history became an unmarked grave,” Junod wrote. “And the man buried inside the frame - The Falling Man - became the Unknown Soldier.”

Twenty-five years later, the image remains caught between those facts. So do the films, paintings and sculptures that followed it: records of terror, violence and loss that are now objects of interpretation, circulation, value and beauty. Every age gets the art it deserves and must accept the art it gets.