Time.com
Time magazine asked photo editors to pick the images that moved them as they selected images to capture the horror of 9/11. The slideshow has 22 images, with comments from the editors who chose them. In the accompanying article, Holly Hughes, editor of Photo District News, recalls images that weren’t made by professional journalists — the posters that went up around New York seeking information on the missing. “How those posters were made, the state of mind of the people who stood at Xerox machines to make copies, it’s too painful to contemplate,” she said. “Those flyers stayed up around the city for weeks, through wind and rain, and became entwined with the sorrow and anxiety we carried with us day after day.”
Olivier Picard, former director of photography for U.S. News & World Report, chose the image below by Patrick Witty (now international picture editor for Time). Picard says the image “best evokes that tumultuous morning. It is 9:59 a.m. and New Yorkers witness the collapse of the South Tower. Their reaction was mine. Immediate. Disbelief. Raw. Violent.”
Related: 10 iconic images from 9/11; Tom Franklin still gets reaction to his photo of firefighters raising flag at ground zero; The Record interviews the photojournalists who rushed to ground zero to cover the attack.