Twenty five years on. Four photographs from the morning of September 11, 2001, by Phil Penman, and his own account of the two hours in which he made them.

Phil Penman was in his early twenties on September 11, 2001, a news photographer with Splash News, and that day was meant to be his first official day off in six months. He had worked until three that morning. When his cellphone rang he ignored it. A voicemail followed, from a Splash reporter: a plane had flown into one of the World Trade Center towers, and he might want to check it out.

He pulled on whatever t-shirt and trousers were to hand, took his camera bag, got on his bicycle and rode. He was at the site inside ten minutes, stopping on the way wherever there was an angle that showed the scale of the towers with the flames at the top of them. He had not yet heard that a second plane had hit.

Trinity Church, and a tower coming down in the viewfinder

He locked his bicycle up, which he says now sounds absurd, and it was the last he saw of it. He was standing by Trinity Church, beside the J&R Music store where he used to get his CDs and DVDs. Around him were businessmen in suits, tourists, construction workers and shop staff, all looking up. Some were screaming. He was working the angle on the church with the towers behind it when the noise started.

Photo: Phil Penman

He took the camera down from his face. Firemen were running past him shouting at him to run, the tower was falling this way. He went into J&R Music, where police and customers were already heading for the back of the store. Within seconds the windows onto the street went black.

Inside the record store

A man ran in, covered head to toe, having just run for his life. A policeman handed him a bottle of water. Penman asked if he could take a couple of pictures. The man told him to go ahead.

Photo: Phil Penman

Back out on the street

When the visibility improved he stepped outside, into what he describes as a parallel universe from the store he had just been standing in. Paperwork was falling out of the sky. The street was covered. There was a deadly silence, and it took him a few minutes to understand what had happened. Then shapes started to resolve into people: some walking, some being held up by friends and colleagues, some sitting in shock.

Photo: Phil Penman

It is worth sitting with that sentence, because it is not the one a photographer is supposed to say about the most consequential morning of his career. He had photographed rioting football fans and celebrities. The closest he had come to this was photographing people after a bereavement, and those had been arranged, with families who wanted to tell their story. He is clear that no sense of purpose arrived to help him.

Three men walking towards him

His parents, watching a live feed in the UK, saw their son on television photographing people walking through the debris. The cellphone networks were overloaded, so he could not call out to tell them he was alive. That was after the first tower came down and before the second.

Photo: Phil Penman

What he kept photographing through the rest of it was not the damage. It was people handing each other water and masks, firemen and police and EMTs helping strangers, a man at a coffee cart refusing to take his money.

Then his boss called from Los Angeles. The papers were waiting, and he had to get back to the office to file. His bicycle was gone, the subway was not running and there were no cabs, so he ran the few miles from the World Trade Center to 38th and 9th with a camera round his neck and a mask on his face, and filed before the internet went down. Leaving the site is, in his words, still one of the biggest regrets he has ever had as a photographer.

The years after

He calls those two hours the beginning rather than the event. For a year afterwards he photographed funerals, and features with people who had lost someone, and everything else the story threw off. He has stayed in touch with many of the people he photographed that day, and they check on each other every year.

Some years later, coming out of a cinema in the East Village with his wife, he got an email from George, the man with the briefcase, asking how he was doing. He broke down in the middle of 2nd Avenue.

And one more line, which he sets down without any drama at all.

About Phil Penman

British born and New York based, Phil Penman has spent twenty five years photographing the same streets. He first came to New York in 1994, decided that was where he wanted to live, and spent six years getting there.

His work has run in The Guardian, The Independent and The New York Review of Books, and his September 11 reportage has been carried by NBC, the BBC, the History Channel and Al Jazeera. Photographs he made that day are held in the archives of the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. His work from the New York lockdown was acquired by the Library of Congress.

He has published three books, Street, New York Street Diaries and Street Scenes. He teaches for the Leica Akademie and shows at the Leica galleries in New York, Washington, Boston and London. We spoke to him about that work in an earlier piece, Street Scenes by Phil Penman.

See the whole series

The four photographs here are a fraction of what he made that morning, and his full account, which is far longer and far better than any summary of it, is on his own site. Read it in his words and see the rest of the series at philpenman.com/features/september-11th, and see his wider work at philpenman.com.

All photographs © Phil Penman, published here with his permission. Quotations are taken verbatim from his own written account of the day.