It is compulsive viewing showing the moment when the second plane punctures the South Tower and the

It is compulsive viewing, showing the moment when the second plane punctures the South Tower and the human activity that follows.Mr Fairbanks did not capture the jumpers Did he edit them out, to save us at least some pain? No He just missed them. Most photographic archives of history’s greatest human calamities almost demand we see bodies. But this tragedy still does not.I saw the jumpers but I never saw bodies I didn’t need to. Nobody did, I don’t think, because when I watched the first of the towers buckle and sink down upon itself with a horrifying roar, I did not think concrete and steel I thought of the people inside and underneath. You knew you were seeing death multiplied thousands of times.Steve McCurry was on the roof of his building on Washington Square Park, when the second of the two towers gave out. His pictures are the first as you enter the exhibition and likewise appear on the cover of the book You cannot escape the shock. “Who would have ever dreamed that one tower would have come down, let alone two?” he says in a caption “It was just indescribable, the terrible sadness.

You might just as well have told me that my mother or father had been killed in an accident, or that my best friend had died. It was a sorrow of that magnitude.”Should this exhibition be curated in a historical institution? Is it history already, when we still don’t have an accurate death toll? For many, the show will be a first time experience. They will be viewing a period of American history – arguably among the most important in the nation’s entire history – at which they were present.Historians will say their discipline is about allowing humans to understand important events. Since we still don’t even know where some of the World Trade Centre victims lived, that is no reason to consider 11 September too recent for history. As Mr Jackson pointed out, America is still uncertain about some parts of the Civil War. The Twin Towers tragedy will hold some questions forever.Seeing these pictures may help understand.

I had forgotten how out of the blue the first tower collapse was. In his video, Mr Fairbanks shows people evacuating the towers calmly, as if they had all day Firemen approached at an equally slow pace. Some, presumably, walking to their tomb.And they help you grasp the breadth of the physical devastation. Many of the pictures show firemen crawling over the wreckage, aiming hoses and searching for survivors. And they are so puny, so seemingly powerless, on a background of rubble so huge and hellish.

“It seemed so incongruous, an emergency work with a small hammer, labouring in this vast devastation,” said Eli Reed of one of his images.Others in the collection focus instead on the ash and the papers that descended on all of lower Manhattan that day. The documents, usually receipts and other testaments to the bureaucratic tedium that was practised on so many floors inside, were simply everywhere, many with their edges singed. Susan Meisalas has a picture in the exhibition of a bronze sculpture of a man peering in a briefcase that used to sit in Liberty Plaza. He is surrounded by ash and papers and trees stripped of leaves.”Images are crucial to our understanding of something,” Mr Hoepker said “It is something in our culture. Even on the day it happened, my assistant called me and told me what was happening, but I didn’t believe her until I turned the television on and actually saw it.” The book, he hopes, may help the most. “People want to have something they can keep on their bookshelves, something they can touch. They can see the images on television, but there, they are fleeting”..