Changed By 9/11: Photographing the 'Pearl Harbor of Our Generation'

This is the first of a two-part story on the 9/11 experience that forever changed the lives of two Greenport residents.

On 9/11, Mark Stetler’s photographic instincts took over.

While most people ran after the second plane hit the World Trade Center, freelance photographer Mark Stetler stayed on the rooftop of his apartment building on Nassau Street and took pictures — some of the clearest, closest shots of the day — only a block and a half away from Ground Zero.

Stetler, now living in Greenport with his wife, freelance photographer Caroline Knopf, said he hardly looks at the harrowing images. But he knew it was time to revisit them and his memories of the day for the 10th anniversary.

With the recent media re-focus on the events of 9/11, Stetler said he did his best not to watch the news or pay too much attention to something he thought he'd recovered from emotionally.

“I stayed away from the media last week," he said. "When you’ve seen panic and desperation and people jumping to their deaths from 1,000 feet … over and over, right in front of you, and when the second plane hit the day just got worse. It is stressful to tell this story.”

Stetler, 47, and Knopf, 48, lived in a spacious second-floor loft on Nassau Street in Lower Manhattan, working primarily as fashion photographers at the time. They ran to the roof of their building when they heard and felt the first plane hit.

Camera in hand, Stetler didn't stop snapping as the Twin Towers fell, and he didn't leave the rooftop until fast-moving debris forced him inside.

“I’m a photographer — I thought to myself that shooting the pictures was important,” he said. “This was the Pearl Harbor of our generation. But at the same time, looking back, I wish I hadn’t been there.”

Stetler stayed put on the rooftop not only because of his photographer’s instincts — he also had no idea what was going on or that the situation was that dangerous.

“When the second plan came around, it looked like a military plane — I thought it was coming to save the day,” he said. “When it hit, that’s when I started thinking that we were under attack from another country’s military.”

He also thought the plane was empty — it had to be.

“Your mind starts shifting to thinking only of the people,” he said. “You can’t comprehend that there would be anyone in that plane.”

Stetler said that he did not get hit by any debris, though he was surrounded by it on the rooftop at one point before the buildings finally collapsed. He also said he felt protected, psychologically, by his lens.

“I saw everything happen, but I saw it through a viewfinder,” he said. “I just kept taking pictures until this massive wall of something came up over us — that’s when Caroline started yelling at me to get inside.”

Knopf said that there are no words to describe how she felt that day.

“We thought we were going to die,” she said. “When the second tower fell, it was like a dollhouse. You could see people inside waving to us for help — they must have felt the shift in the building. Then it just turned into a cloud before our eyes.

You could feel the souls that were leaving us as that building went down.”