[alarms blaring]
[somber piano music]
[Vincent Brown] On September 11th, 2001,
hijackers crashed two planes
into New York's World Trade Center
in the single deadliest terror attack in U.S. history.
I remember visiting friends in Manhattan soon afterward.
In the midst of the shock, disorientation,
and the upwelling of grief,
there was already a remarkable commemoration taking place.
Every few blocks, you could see pictures of the missing.
Flowers, candles, and coins piled up around the portraits.
But these weren't the most enduring images of the event.
Among the countless photographs taken that day,
the most recognizable is probably this one:
"Raising the Flag at Ground Zero."
This image of three New York City firefighters
was published around the world,
and quickly became a cultural phenomenon.
But it was not the only photograph
of the flag raising taken that day.
So what made this one so powerful?
Why did it capture the public's imagination?
What did it mean to different people?
And what should it mean to us now?
[film reeling]
[slow beating music]
I've come to the Jersey City waterfront,
across from lower Manhattan, to meet the person who took
"Raising the Flag at Ground Zero."
So can you tell me what happened on that day?
[Thomas Franklin] So I was initially in the office,
editor came running into the photo department
and said a plane had crashed into World Trade.
[Vincent Brown] Franklin grabbed his camera
and drove here to the waterfront.
[Thomas Franklin] It was an incredibly dramatic scene.
And this huge plume of smoke...
The sky was, like, as blue as could be.
It was just... unlike anything I had ever seen.
[Vincent Brown] After photographing the scene from a distance,
Franklin took a police boat across the river.
[Thomas Franklin] It was surreal.
The entire landscape was just filled with debris,
like shards of metal, and
everything was covered in this gray dust.
[Vincent Brown] So how did you get the photograph?
Where were you when you took it?
[Thomas Franklin] I saw these three firemen
out of the corner of my eye,
fumbling with the flag about 30 yards away.
So I quickly moved over into position,
got my- changed my lens, and...
you know, in a very short amount of time
they hoisted the flag up the pole.
I shot a burst of pictures --
I think I shot a series of about 24 pictures
in less than two minutes.
[Vincent Brown] Among them, one frame stood out:
an eye-level shot foregrounding the three firefighters,
with the American flag midway up the pole.
[suspenseful bass music]
Here at the 9/11 Memorial Museum,
I'm meeting the person who decided
how to use a vast collection of media
to tell the story of that day.
Why do you think that image
became so popular so immediately?
[Jan Ramirez] I think it became popular
because it was, first of all,
"the shot seen 'round the world."
There was a tremendous strategy
to when it was released to the AP Wire.
[Vincent Brown] After Franklin had finished shooting,
he sent 40 different images back to his photo editor,
who selected the flag raising as the most distinctive.
The Record published it,
then quickly offered it to the Associated Press,
who made it available globally.
For those viewers who saw it
circulate around the world so immediately,
what do you think was important to them?
[Jan Ramirez] You know, the morning images
that people tended to have seen
were of buildings, of fireballs,
of utterly incomprehensible wreckage --
but not particularly of people.
These are: People are back.
People are back, trying to do something purposeful.
I think it represents fortitude,
and in a certain way, brotherhood --
you know, the power of collective action,
which you see here.
[Vincent Brown] The appeal of this image
also intrigues Fred Ritchin,
Dean Emeritus of the school at the ICP
and former photo editor for the New York Times Magazine.
[Fred Ritchin] That's one reason it was so popular,
because it was like a-
a victory: "We won.
It's okay. It'll be okay."
[Vincent Brown] But this wasn't the only image
taken of the flag raising.
Two other photographers that also captured it
from very different angles.
There were a lot of images taken.
Why do you think it was this image that became iconic?
- These images give the sense of these people being dwarfed
by the size of the destruction.
And the Ricky Flores image looking down at the guys
as they're trying to raise the flag,
and it's not an uplifting image --
it's a struggle to lift the flag.
I think the Lori Grinker image
is asking a lot of questions about, you know,
is America gonna emerge from this?
It's a probing interrogation of the event and the future.
You know, it's, "We have a long road ahead of us.
This is horrific.
This is enormous destruction.
This is apocalyptic."
And it asks the question, "Are we gonna be able to prevail?"
And I think the Franklin image
is all about resilience,
and all about, you know, "We're gonna win."
I think this very quickly resolved the pain.
[Vincent Brown] It was that promise of a quick victory
that seems to have resonated with many Americans.
Almost as soon as it was published,
the photograph took on a life of its own.
Here in New Jersey, Franklin and I
have come to one of the storage areas
for the 9/11 Memorial Museum.
It contains artifacts from the day of the attack,
as well as items collected afterward.
[Thomas Franklin] In the weeks and months
and even years after 9/11,
that image was like a cultural phenomenon.
You couldn't walk anywhere in New York City
without somebody trying to sell you stuff.
You know, it was reproduced in photographs and paintings
and murals and statues and coffee cups,
because people couldn't get enough of it.
- So here we have a lot of representations
of what happened with this image, how people used it.
And it's interesting what they did with it -- here,
right, they've added a soldier with a gun.
- Yeah. [somber piano music]
Yeah, it transforms it a little bit there.
- Mhmm.
The addition of a soldier suggests another reason
the image caught the public's imagination:
its similarity to this famous World War II photo
taken by Joe Rosenthal.
[Thomas Franklin] I remember when I was making the picture,
recognizing that it had a visual similarity
to Rosenthal's picture, but...
but my photograph happened like a play in football:
I saw it,
- Yeah. - I got into position,
chose the right lens,
and responded to what I saw.
But it was really just a coincidental thing.
[Vincent Brown] The Rosenthal photograph captures six U.S. Marines
raising a flag during the Battle of Iwo Jima,
a crucial turning point in the Pacific conflict.
The image played an important role
in renewing public commitment to the war
at a time when support was wavering.
It appeared on 137 million commemorative stamps,
helped the U.S. raise $26 billion for the war effort,
and provided the model for the Marine Corps Memorial
in Washington, D.C.
50 years later, the Ground Zero flag raising photo
had a similar galvanizing effect.
It not only helped to raise significant funds
for the victims of 9/11,
but also helped foster support for a war.
That's the conclusion drawn by Guy Westwell,
a scholar who has studied the similarity
between the two images.
So what consequences do you see
that resonance between and among those images?
[Guy Westwell] The American government at that time
wanted to move to a war footing
and it needed to take the people of America with it.
In the case of these photographs,
they call on arguably just wars of the past,
so, "World War II is necessary,
and therefore it logically follows
that the wars that follow 9/11 are necessary.
[Vincent Brown] In this context, the New York City firefighters
echo soldiers from 50 years earlier,
reinforcing the idea
that a military response to 9/11 was required,
and helping to pave the way
for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that followed.
[Guy Westwell] The photograph doesn't work completely in isolation.
The news coverage was already referring to it as a war.
Pearl Harbor was a key reference point.
But as the photograph comes into play,
it consolidates and reiterates
and becomes a sort of pivot point.
So all the nationalist energies
that feed into and reinforce that jingoistic sense of,
"Now we must wage war,"
flow through the image.
They're channeled by it in a way
that makes war seem like the correct choice.
Photographs, they're very effective
technologies of persuasion,
because they're seemingly just documentary artifacts,
and yet they're relaying
all these historical reference points and pulling into play
this particular, quite limited,
understanding of how history works.
[Vincent Brown] Do you think that in some ways
this is an image of a war to come?
[Jan Ramirez] You know, I mean, you can look at pictures
from the moment. - Mm.
- From the day.
And then with the benefit, or curse, of hindsight.
And so we can also look at this photograph and say
this sets up what happens for the next 20 years.
- Mm. - There is going to be a response.
Whether you wanted war or not,
it became a military response.
It became the "War on Terror."
And 20 years later, [inhales]
you know, you can say did it or didn't it...
achieve its objectives,
but it defines the next two decades of this 21st century.
[Vincent Brown] So it sounds like you're saying
this image has become so iconic
that people don't know the story behind it,
- which makes it so powerful. - Right.
Well, that's what happens with icons, right?
They get divorced from their context.
And our job as historians and curators here
is to anchor this back to the truth
of actually what happened,
when it happened, to whom it happened.
[somber piano music]
[Thomas Franklin] You know, there's a certain responsibility
that comes along with having taken pictures
that are part of the public consciousness.
At one point, the photograph was being used
by the U.S. military in Afghanistan,
in some capacity, they were handing out leaflets
with the photograph on it.
I didn't think that was a really appropriate use
of the photograph at the time.
I mean, how many years later are we now?
I still receive letters and emails from people, you know,
telling me what the picture means to them.
And, you know, that's pretty incredible
that after all this time, you know,
people could look at that picture
and get that kind of emotional response from it.
For me, that picture will always represent
thousands of people who died horrifically
on one of the worst days in our history.
[somber piano music]
[Vincent Brown] A picture's meaning doesn't have a single author.
When an image speaks to people's deepest emotions,
they often make it their own
and they can compel it to say what they need it to say.
Thomas Franklin's photo
distilled a powerfully heroic symbolism
from a confusing and catastrophic day.
But when the image became iconic,
it eclipsed the circumstances of its creation
The bigger picture may be in the background,
not the foreground --
in the lives lost
and our struggle to remember them.
[inquisitive string music]