Philip Gourevitch on Gilles Peress's Photo from September 11th

It's all there in this photograph of first responders reduced to helpless bystanders in a wilderness of pulverized concrete. We cannot see what they see, but in their attitude of stricken astonishment we feel it—the recognition of the unrecognizable that confronted us on that Tuesday morning in September. We see them standing in that ashen pall, like the last survivors of a lost time, and it comes only as an afterthought that they appear not to notice the one other living thing we know was there—the photographer, my friend and colleague Gilles Peress.

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Gilles was the first person after my parents whom I called that morning. He was already on the Brooklyn Bridge, carrying his cameras into lower Manhattan against the tide of tens of thousands fleeing the gashed and burning towers. “We're under attack,” he said by way of explanation. Then, right before we lost connection, he said, just as matter-of-factly, “This is fucking insane.”