'I saw the towers smoking': Photographer relives 9/11 attacks

By Andy Roesgen

CHICAGO, United States (AA) - Gary Marlon Suson is telling his story while getting his weekly intravenous drip for lung damage he suffered at the World Trade Center ground zero.

“I'm not a cancer patient," he muses, "so I'm lucky.”

These are busy days for Gary, exhilarating yet a little depressing at the same time, as he prepares for the weekend's opening of a new 9/11 museum of his photos and artifacts, inside the Illinois high school he attended a lifetime ago.

Suson was a fashion and celebrity photographer in New York, getting ready for a shoot on Sept. 11, 2001, when he got a kick on his apartment door from a neighbor. The World Trade Center had been attacked.

"I thought he was joking," Suson recalled, "and that's when he screamed through the door, 'open up your door, get up to the roof immediately and get your damn camera.'"

On the roof, Suson recalls a sunny and warm "perfect morning." But in the distance, “I saw the towers smoking and I started shooting.”

By the time the towers collapsed, while others were running for their lives from ground zero, Suson was headed straight to the site, to keep taking photos. But in all the chaos, he stopped to help in the search for victims.

Twenty years later, it is still "a big blur, just a lot of body parts, victims everywhere, smoke, it was just something out of a bad movie."

For days afterward, most of the world sat glued to their television sets watching the scene unfold, indeed like a movie, but Suson remembers something no casual viewer could ever comprehend.

"It was a chemical nightmare down there, every chemical in the world."

As Suson learned later, each floor of the World Trade Center's two towers -- a total of 220 floors - contained two cleaning supply closets, each with 20 gallon drums of cleaning fluid. Added to the mercury inside the computers, the fluorescent light bulbs, the formaldehyde, the plastics, the furniture and it was all a toxic brew.

"The data shows that chemicals were created that morning that don't even exist," Suson said. "And people were breathing that in,” including Suson.

After several hours in the mess of that day, Suson started to feel sick. A doctor later told him he was having an allergic, anaphylactic reaction to the chemicals. And it was just the start of the lung damage that he contends with to this very day.

- Documenting the disaster

In the days after 9/11, a friend, a police officer, would drive Suson around lower Manhattan so he could keep taking pictures.

Eventually, he caught the eye of the New York City Fire Department, which invited him to be their official photographer as they dug through the rubble. The department wanted someone to document and verify that they were treating all the victims of the disaster with respect as bodies, or body parts, were removed.

The job gave Suson unprecedented access to ground zero and an overwhelming feeling that he, alone, was being chosen to document a world-changing event.

"I about had a heart attack -- the only photographer in the world ... I couldn't believe a kid from a horse farm Illinois was being given this chance."

His first day was unforgettable.

"The only thing I can compare it to is you're a 5-year-old boy and it's your first time walking into Wembley Stadium to see a soccer match. It's very overwhelming.”

Ground zero was 100 feet deep, covered by the twisted steel, he remembers.

"The first night I came home from shooting, I cried and I cried, it was overwhelming. 'Why me? I'm a nobody. How am I going to capture all this?'" he recalls thinking.

He worked day and night, sleeping in a church at ground zero.

"I just prayed every night for God to give me guidance."

- Telling the story through photos

Suson remembers how firefighters would split into groups, digging tediously, looking for bodies, "non-stop." But it was rare that they would find a wholly-intact body.

He would shoot photos in groups: men digging, Black and women first responders, chaplains praying, K-9 search dogs.

One photo, a firefighter on his knees in prayer, became his most iconic, and also became the cover of a book of photos he later published with Barnes and Noble, called Requiem.

The job with the fire department was unpaid. Suson said he drained his bank account to keep going financially until 2002 when Requiem was released. Later, the department named him honorary battalion chief.

When it all finally came to an end in the spring of 2002, when all the dust and as many human remains could be retrieved were cleared away, Suson had mixed emotions.

"It was very sad for the families that didn't find their loved ones.” But he was happy, personally, because "I was coughing, I was in bad shape. I wanted it to be over."

- Sharing with the world

For the next few years, Suson looked for ways to share his photos with the public. Local museums turned down his offer to partner.

"They said they didn't think the world needed to know about 9/11."

But a visit to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, the Netherlands convinced him that a small museum could put a big face on an historic event, so he developed his 9/11 Museum Workshop.

He filled it with photos and with officials' permission, he was allowed to keep and display any artifacts that were deemed non-essential to the investigation at ground zero, like glass and steel, that would have been thrown away.

He was also loaned artifacts from victims' families.

The families, he said, "know I don't do this for money. They know my heart's in it."

"Much to my surprise, (the museum) became number 1 on Trip Advisor, and a 5-star rated museum, and we were able to raise thousands of dollars for fire department charities."

- A new generation to teach

Years later, in 2019, Suson was given a humanitarian award for this work at his hometown high school in Barrington, Illinois, outside Chicago, and it got him thinking.

In the days right after 9/11, billboards and murals sprung up across America with the words "Never Forget." An instant social question was born: "Where were you on 9/11?"

But high school students today were not alive when 9/11 happened. How can they "never forget"?

Suson envisioned the idea for a new museum at Barrington High School, and the school jumped on the plan.

Anne Thyfault, a 17-year-old senior at the school, is helping put the 1,500-square-foot museum together.

"I feel like, for my generation, 9/11 has become a history event. It's less ingrained in our brains," she told Anadolu Agency.

"The impact of 9/11 hasn't been processed yet for students. As soon as they enter (the museum), they'll be blown away by the imagery and the stories that are told. It makes you realize these are real people."

Included in the museum is a 120-pound artifact called The Islamic Steel Crescent & Moon, cut from World Trade Center steel, the only one to honor the roughly 34 Muslims who died on 9/11. While there were several Jewish and Christian artifacts cut from the steel, Suson said it was “too easy for innocent Muslims to be swept under the carpet” in the aftermath of 9/11.

Ironically, Suson said he never talks about 9/11 with anyone, except in media interviews, and so, with a new generation about to wander past his work, "It's a reward that money can never buy, the feeling that I get when I see the kids standing in front of a 2-by-3-foot photo, with an audio wand and they're listening to the stories."

"They'll learn from it, trust me," he said.