Customer Reviews

Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11

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Mr. Friend has written a wide-ranging analysis of 9-11 through his interpretation of the photographic record. Frame by frame, he gives a mini-discourse on the meaning of each photo then and subsequent political interpretations. "Watching the World Change" is not a book one will read straight through -- not given the images. It is a volume to ponder and think upon. For further viewing, the best photographic record is "Here is New York" (2002) with its nearly 1,000 photos of 9-11 and the days to follow. No commentary is necessary for this book.

This book should become required reading for the professional photographers. It also is one of the best written books I have ever read . This author takes you with him to point you feel you are witnessing the events of 9/11 and the aftermath along with the actual people of New York. I wish I had the money to buy a copy of this book for all the people who have not yet read it.

A compelling and unique perspective on the World Trade Center terrorist attack. At times it reads like a breathless page-turning thriller as we relive events of that terrible day. But it's the larger picture that makes this book so gripping - the stories behind the still and moving images that are indelibly etched in our collective memories of 9/11. An important and extremely well written book.

This beautifully written book describes the stories behind the images of September 11th in a gripping manner, but goes much further. The genius of the book is its analysis of the ways in which select images of 9/11 have been used by the media and the government to present a specific and calculated view of terrorism and world politics. The writing is exquisite and the analysis would make Marshall McLuhan proud. A must.

I watched the 9/11 attack on television for hours, for days. I read about it in depth. I thought I could feel no deeper sympathy for the dead, their families, even myself for witnessing it, for having it happen to my country. But this book is even more vivid. You can't read it for long. You have to put it down. You need a break from drama this awful. The emotions whip you, twist your stomach. But then you have to pick it up again because neither can you stay away from it. Unforgettable. A tremendous reading experience.

Burt Boyar
Los Angeles, CA

The 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center was not only the biggest news event in decades, it was also the most photographed one. Some people by chance got pictures of Flight 11 crashing into the north tower, and after that the cameras never stopped. "Men and women by the hundreds, then thousands - bystanders with point-and-shoots, TV news teams, photojournalists by the score - felt compelled to snap history, fiery and cruel against the blue." So writes David Friend, who used to be the director of photography for _Life_ magazine, in _Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11_ (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). You have heard plenty of 9/11 stories, but chances are you remember mostly the images. Friend makes the point that Americans who are old enough remember where they were when they _heard_ about JFK's shooting, but they remember where they were when they _saw_ the 9/11 terror attacks. The book is a lucid and fascinating recounting of how some of the most famous of the photographs came to be. It is not a coffee-table book full of photos; there are only forty or so reproduced here, but the recounting of the shots and the reflections on photography in the modern news era will make intense reading even for those who have seen the images over and over. And all of us have seen the images over and over; we cannot look away, which makes Friend's observations particularly pertinent.

The day was a perfect one for photography, a cloudless late-summer morning. When the first plane hit, cameras were already working at their previous jobs. There was an internet art exhibition that featured postcard panoramas of Manhattan every four seconds, the robot camera staring at the skyline and clicking away. One of its photos shows the tiny airplane approaching the north tower, the next smoke and dust issuing from the building, and the next a huge ball of fire. Thereafter, hundreds of photographers, with equipment ranging from the most expensive professional cameras to disposable cameras bought just for the event, started taking pictures, and by the time the second plane hit fifteen minutes later, the chaos was being completely documented. Some was immediately broadcast; some was censored by the photographers or by their news agencies. French television, for instance, tended to show people dropping from the buildings, some in pairs, some in groups, some holding hands, but American television tended not to show those last descents. As morbid as such pictures might be, families sought them out to get last glimpses of their loved ones. Photos sometimes had to stand in for remains during funerals, since photos lasted while bodies had vaporized. 9/11 happened as photographers were changing from film to digital images. (The book even reproduces a daguerreotype image of the burning towers, made by a photographer who had been using the ancient camera for a historic photo documentation project.) A decade before, rolls of film would have to be developed and distributed before they could be seen, but digital cameras not only allow for immediate assessment of the shot, they allow for its immediate forwarding to a potential publishing source.

Friend barely covers the crashes at the Pentagon and on the field in Pennsylvania, but he does allow his narrative to range on larger issues, such as the wishful thinking that allowed photographs to be interpreted as evidence of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, or the lurid and shameful images someone just had to record of torture within Abu Ghraib, or the "heroic" shot of President Bush on his plane in deep concentration of his new responsibilities after the attacks. Friend writes that this photo, controversially used in Republican fundraising appeals, was promulgated to counter the image of the paralyzed man just sitting with first graders for seven confounded minutes after he learned of the attacks. For the most part, however, this is an absorbing reflection about the attacks on the twin towers, and on photography itself, its current technological forms, and its power to provoke, document, delude, and inspire.

This is a prefect craft of the power of photographs and everything that comes into play around shooting a cataclysmic disaster such as 9/11. The author has navigated the wherabouts of several people and what drove them to shoot that day and the affects of certain photos on our lives. The NOTES section at the end, the bibliography, is the best and most detailed that I've ever seen. Photos in the middle of the book are well used and described throughout the book.

I really enjoyed knowing more about the photographers behind the photos. Some of the technical information was more than I needed, but it was very well written and I would recommend it.

David Friend has collected some outstanding pictures and informative interviews in Watching the World Change. And he is certainly right in his argument that the 9/11 terrorism made every citizen a potential photojournalist and went a long way to cementing digital photography's triumph over film. He is also exactly right in capturing both the global nature of the event and how quickly people became witnesses to it. In other words, his book validates the reality of nearly instantaneous global information. The book is annoying, however, because while Friend tiptoes up to, he does not really address the issue of how much of that instantaneously available information, especially graphic photographs, the public really needs to know, how such photos should be handled by both photographer and the media. He dodges any judgement and consistently refuses to criticize any photographer's behavior, no matter how boorish or sensational it might be. In short, Friend provides little help in the question of "where are the boundaries?". If this question matters, and I think it does, Friend's book -- while an excellent chronicle of who shot what with what kind of camera when -- is less than it could have been.

Having recently seen David Friend on tv, I read his book, originally produced five years ago. In many ways this is a terrific retrospective on 9/11, told through photographers' lenses and personal eyes.

Much is revealed in Friend's book...not only personal accounts of the day but how photography has changed in the ensuing ten years. As Friend notes, if the tragedy had occurred today, thousands trapped in the towers would have taken digital photos from their cell phones, not something readily available then.

The format of the book supposedly takes one day at a time form the original day, but it's very loosely tied to them. A side track about Abu Ghraib distracts from the week after the attack. It doesn't add to the narrative.

Friend finishes with the famous photo of the three NYC firemen raising the flag at the ruins of ground zero and the controversies that followed. It's a fitting end to see how America, hardly innocent before the planes hit, became less so with the grab to make money out of the public image from that photo.