Pressphotographers on 9/11

Pressphotographers for a day...

Me and Martin decided a while back that we wanted to document the events around the memorial ceremony of 9/11. A few days before the actual event, we went down to Ground Zero to take some pictures. We went around looking at the site, and within long I was talking to several construction workers and other people around the site - Asking them how they felt five years after the events, how they felt about the new freedom tower being constructed and so on.
It was a very interesting experience, not only to hear how people felt but also the whole "journalistic" kind of approach. Don't be fooled, we weren't trying to be journalists but wanted to know how people felt for ourselves and without the generalization that the media is forced to use when reporting news.
People where really open when I approached them and where more than happy to talk about the things that happened.
Generally people where happy to be moving on, and the construction workers all felt it was a good way to move on, by building the freedom tower, which is currently being constructed.
I also met a young couple from Toronto(Deirdre & Greg), who told their story - They told me how they could see the smoke from the towers all the way in Toronto where the lived, when the planes hit the towers. It was obvious that they where affected by what happened five years ago, and they said that it felt eerie to be standing at the location where so many people died.
On the actual day of 9/11 we once again went down to Ground Zero - This time to cover the events during the ceremony. It was a very interesting experience to see how many different people and groups gathered at Ground Zero, and how many was trying to get the attention of the media.
We quickly fell into the role as "pressphotographers" and where soon standing shoulder by shoulder with members of the media. 5 hours later we where on our way back to our hotel to review our shots - It was a bit exhausting to work so intense trying to capture the events and moods of the memorial ceremony, because you are constantly looking in all directions trying to get a feel for whets going on and looking for that great shot all photographers hunt in their work.
The next 24 hours or so, was spend reviewing our shots, editing, writing an article and producing a multimedia presentation consisting of 36 selected images from the memorial ceremony - The presentation was supported by a soundtrack made up of several audiosources we had captured during our work.
Everything was then sent to Jyllands Posten, our mediapartner, to see if it could be used. We send the material to them very late in the night after which we went to bed, anxiously awaiting their feedback, so it was a great feeling to wake up and read an email saying that it was excellent work we had produced and that it had been published - Not bad for a couple of wannabe photographers ;)

Everything was published along with an article about Martin and I, and the whole project we are doing. The articles are in Danish so some of you might not understand them, but the multimedia presentation should be universally understandable in the powerful language of pictures and sound.

Article about us

Article about the memorial ceremony on 9/11

Photo presentation on 9/11

We have gotten a lot of very positive feedback on our work, which is a great feeling since we have put a lot of energy into it. We hope you like it, or at least that it invokes some feelings in you.

All in all a very interesting experience, meeting people and seeing how open they where, working as "pressphotographers" and the whole process of brutal selection and editing of our images, working with and mixing a supporting audiotrack and creating a presentation as well as a writing the article. We more or less worked with every kind of "media" except for video, which we actually used to capture some of the audio from.
It's certainly not the last time I do a presentation of pictures and sound - Sound is a fantastic way to support a series of pictures with a specific subject.

We would love to get your comments on our work :)

Oh yeah, when you go to one of the links you will also be able to see a picture of us sitting in Central park - I'm not sure how interesting it is, but you never know :)