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Welcome to Fronteras, a Changing America.

I'm Susan Morée.

Thank you for joining me.

With me today is photojournalist Lonnie Schlein.

Lonnie was the New York Times photography editor responsible for the photography that documented the attacks on September 11th, 2001.

On that day 25 years ago, 2977 people were killed in a single day.

441 first responders rushed to their deaths trying to save the lives of others.

It was a tragic day in American history, and it included an attack on the Pentagon and a plane that crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

There was also the aftermath, when first responders searched frantically in the rubble of the collapsed Twin towers, some digging with their bare hands, seeking survivors, but there were few to be found in the wreckage.

Then the grim task of searching for human remains began.

A special section the New York Times created, called A Nation Challenged, documented the attack and its aftermath, and it won a Pulitzer Prize.

That special section later inspired what became a bestselling book of photographs, which Lonnie co-edited.

Lonnie's photographic work, including photos from the 9/11 attack, will be on display at the Mad Hatter Gallery in downtown Las Cruces.

The exhibit opens this Friday, appropriately, on September 11th, and it runs through October 3rd.

Lonnie, thank you for joining me.

Thank you.

Susan, it's a pleasure to be here.

And by the way, you just once again, 25 years later, you brought chills down my spine.

Listening to what you just said is that you don't ever lose that.

It was a really tragic day.

Yeah.

Take us back to that day at 8:46 a.m.. The first plane drove into the North Tower.

At 9:03 a.m., the second plane hit the south tower.

Where were you?

And that moment?

So we lived, we lived at Waterside Plaza in Manhattan, which is adjacent to the 34th Street Heliport in New York and built into the river.

and, it's consists of 4 36 story buildings.

And we didn't live in the southernmost tower.

So the first.

Well, the first thing that happened was we had a guest, from Germany, staying with us, a young woman who was a friend, a daughter of a friend of my wife's.

And I heard this incessant knocking on the door.

That bedroom, which was our daughter's bedroom, did look at the very tip top of one of the towers.

Oh, wow.

And she walked.

She woke me up with a pounding on the door.

There's a fire in that big building.

She had no idea that was a plane involved.

And I quickly ran.

It took me.

It took me two minutes to get to the room before my phone rang.

And it was the New York Times picture desk.

First word was a small plane.

Had so many people thought a small plane had hit one of the towers.

So they asked me to get to take a camera and go to the southernmost tower of Waterside Plaza and shoot whatever I could, and then get into the office immediately.

Unfortunately, we had an upstate home.

That's unfortunate.

Was unfortunate was that all of my camera gear was upstate at our house.

All I had at home was a 3.5 megapixel camera.

Not enough to really capture detail that far away, but somehow or other, I got.

I got to the roof of the tower and I got a few frames, just a few frames, and one of them worked.

and the next thing I was on the way to the office and, I walked into a rather frantic newsroom, to say the least.

And it was then clear by the time I got there, well, I actually watched the both towers were in flames when I got to the roof, that of the Waterside Plaza tower.

So we knew it was a terrorist attack.

And I didn't get the details, of course, until I got into the office.

And you had just started as the, on the metro, so.

That's correct.

Newspaper.

Can you talk about that?

Yes.

I had been, national photo editor at the New York Times for ten years.

And that summer of 2001, I was on vacation for a month, and I got a call from, one of my superiors asking if I'd be interested, since I'd been there for ten years and doing a whole new thing.

Moving to the metro section, the exciting prospect of it was that it was going to be redesigned, and to give it the biggest photo display of anywhere on the paper, and you'd have 36 staff photographers reporting to you.

You can't turn this down, can you?

Lonnie?

And I said, don't think so.

And though I was reluctant to give up because the national photo editing job of the New York Times is really a highly competitive position, it's something that every photo editor in New York would dream of having.

And I was lucky enough to have it for ten for ten years.

That must have been, I can't imagine what that was like.

Wasn't it your second day of work in that new position?

Exactly.

It was when 911 happened was the second day of work, and, when I arrived in the office, we were all the top editors were meeting.

And I mean, the executive editor, the managing editor, and lots of other people meeting in what we called the page room conference room.

And I was ordered, to quickly appear with as many photos as I can get my hand on, but there was a period between my arrival and when the page one conference room, started to take place.

so I was editing staff photographers who had been to Ground Zero and freelancers and looking at the wires.

So there were tons of pictures, and I could not walk in to the executive editor and say, hey, look what I have.

So I had to try to whittle it down to a, you know, to a usable number of pictures.

I walked in there with the pile of pictures, and everyone started scattering them all over the table and trying to figure out, what the page one likely pictures were going to be and what we were going to use inside.

And there was very little, very little argument, very little dissent.

Everyone sort of agreed on my proposals with the executive editor, of course, who was then Hal Raines, who was newly appointed executive editor, and he was hit bang with this with 911.

Right on.

And, so we we looked through all these pictures and the only discussion really was about the falling bodies, pictures.

there were some people, few who thought that should go on the front page and on the.

I disagreed.

The feeling was quickly that that picture.

It must go inside when I, you know, you need the event, the event on the front and emotion inside.

And that's really the way we looked at both the cover and all the jump pages as we call them.

Yeah.

Okay.

at 9:37 a.m., the Pentagon was struck by a third plane and part of that building collapsed.

What happened then at the New York Times, you all were focused on the Twin Towers?

Well, I don't I don't recall, but I don't think I actually I arrived at the office after all.

All all the planes had hit.

Okay.

Yeah.

So we had we had a staff photographer, two staff photographers in Washington, full time people.

One of them was driving to the New York Times Bureau, from where he lived in Virginia and was had to pass the Pentagon.

Oh, wow.

You know, and he got he got a few shots off from his car window, which were fabulous.

was was not hard, hard to miss.

and so we had all that stuff available to us.

So I'm wrong on the timing.

I think we probably didn't meet in the page one conference room until 1030 or 11.

I think everyone was collecting thoughts and hey, the managing editor and the heads of the various desk were busy assigning reporters from worldwide and in New York to get in location and start reporting on the international reaction, of course, from New York.

So I had some time to to gather the pictures.

Yeah, it was, it was quite a process, as you can imagine.

There were thousands of pictures and I was trying to edit at the same time while I was collecting all these pictures, waiting for the lab to print.

And it was all it was.

It was, we hit the, the the switch over from, from, from digital to film was just taking place during that period.

So there were, there were compact disc cars, some cameras.

And there was, there were it was black and white and some color film as well.

I was going to ask you about that in a minute, but, at 9:59 a.m., the South Tower collapsed.

That was completely unthinkable at the time.

The subway system was still running in New York, and there was a subway station underneath the Twin Towers.

No one believed that the towers would collapse.

Pancaking is the word they used.

The pancaking of the towers.

Thank you.

And, what happened at that point?

Where did you all become concerned about your, worker, your employees safety?

Yeah.

Well, again, I hadn't arrived at the office yet, but yes, I had I had awful.

My wife was up at our country home, and she later on in the day, she was unable to come into the city because the bridges had been closed.

And one daughter was my oldest daughter was working for the AP.

she was very much involved in getting down to Ground zero and, bringing back film and compact, flash cards to the AP and my youngest daughter was away at school out of town, so we weren't concerned about about her, but, it was so much commotion, and I don't think we really we really started to to lay out the pages to think about the issue of of the falling man pictures until quite a bit later.

The timing is very vague right now, but I would, I would guess it was pretty close to noon.

So everything had happened already.

The airports were closed.

you.

Yeah.

Okay.

And at 10:02 a.m., had then President George W Bush had closed the airspace, already.

But a plane went down at 1002 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Most of us probably didn't know where Shanksville, Pennsylvania even was.

What did what happened then at the New York Times?

Were you there yet?

No.

Again, that was still, I it's for so I guess I had arrived at that point.

I must have because after I took that picture from the tower, I quickly got dressed and went.

So I must have been in the office after 9:00 and all that news kept flying at us, right?

and the horror of it was beginning to sink in that it was another plane down at the Pentagon.

And, yeah, it's all still, as I said before.

Yeah, just talking about it, which I haven't done quite a while, still gives me the terrible feeling.

Chills and horror.

Yeah, yeah.

And then at 10:28 a.m., the North Tower collapsed.

Right.

You have a photograph which I. So that that dates the photograph.

Right.

Because the right.

That's a good correction of it because the photograph was taken as they were both collapsing.

And it was right after I took that picture that I went into the office.

So, yeah, it was all just on a personal emotional basis.

I mean, my first thought, as I recall, was, hey, is there any nuclear material?

What are we looking at?

Let's go.

Are we all going to be I mean, I was freaked out, I was scared, I was very worried.

It was a personal thing and much more beyond that.

It then became a New York Times thing, and I had to deal with it trying to put aside.

And you could see in the page room conference room that, that, people were very emotional about it.

They didn't really at that point, I don't think anyone knew exactly where the families might be or what was in the air.

It was all a great, awful mystery at that time of the day.

You know, the photo I was thinking of is a tea set.

A photo of a tea set.

Okay.

That was completely covered.

Yes.

That was that was taken.

I can't recall whether that was taken.

That was taken by Ed Keating, who was no longer with us, but he was one of the one of the best staff photographers.

How he worked his way into that building directly across from 911 and got into worked his way into ground Zero.

And there's a fabulous picture that he took, which will be part of the exhibition of workers dismantling with Blowtorches, the steel to get beyond a certain point.

So that was all, it was all happening.

it all happened before I got into the office.

Yeah.

You must have looked at thousands, thousands and thousands.

Is there one in particular that is still etched in your mind that when you think nine, 11, that's the photo that you think of, it's that, it's the the building in flames that ran on page one, which, will be on exhibition.

not the original, but the, the front page of the New York Times that day has a very deep vertical picture of one of the towers and flames before it even crumbled.

Yeah.

That picture.

And I must say that, I don't want to appear to be complimenting myself, but every all the photographers in New York were all rushing as close as possible to ground Zero.

I as far as I know, I have never seen a picture of a cityscape, which is the one, the only one.

I was capable of taking that cityscape with the towers in the distance, burning or collapsing.

Rather, the flames were gone at that point, but the building, the collapsing of was that moment that I took the picture.

Yes.

So that was ten, I don't know, I forget the time, but yeah.

Then I was quickly in the office.

There, the New York Times started a special section that ran for about, I think, three months until the end of December, called an accounting challenge.

Yes, Hal Raines invented that section on the spot in the conference room right away.

How was how is the times to accommodate a new section?

He took the sports section and had the sports section turned, so in reverse, I believe.

And the nation challenged was that number of pages that that formed a supplement and that went on, as you said, for for three months.

It was three months in that room every day laying out those pages.

Yeah.

And then it became a book.

Can you talk about that?

Yes.

So, the following, early on, well, we started talking about the book in the, in the fall of 2001.

I mean, late in the fall, probably in November or maybe even into the winter.

And it was clear that The New York Times had to produce a book of its, of record of its own photographers and freelancers, and also some wider pictures were included, if we liked that and other and the other sources I just mentioned, we started planning it, early.

Yeah.

And I think, it was published in 2002. pretty, as I recall, it was in the spring of 2002 that the books were available for sale.

And we worked very closely with, the publisher was Nicholas Callaway.

If the name rings a bell, it's a Callaway Golf Clubs.

And, you know, the whole, he was producing books at that point, and he was just wonderful.

And he worked very closely with every stage.

And so Nancy Lee, who was my immediate superior, who was director of photography at the time, I was just below her.

The two of us were constantly shuttling back and forth between the publisher's office downtown and to and to and to the New York Times Building, thence to long 48 West 43rd Street.

So it was a lot of it was very difficult to juggle my work.

I didn't get I wasn't replaced as as the photo editor on On Duty.

So it was, but it was all it was fascinating.

I just I feel that tension even talking about it now, really.

And the special section won a Pulitzer Prize.

Well, I wouldn't say that.

That's a section.

There were two Pulitzer Prizes.

One was for, one was for breaking news.

I that were mostly involved, the correspondents and the reporters and the editors.

And the other one was for photography.

And as I recall, it was divided into two parts feature photographer fee and and breaking news photography.

Yeah.

So, the Pulitzer was awarded as a group.

I did not a lot.

A lot of it was a group of about, I don't know, 10 to 12 people who really were named as the Pulitzer Prize winners.

But it was a team effort.

No one of us could have done anything right.

alone.

and yet I must say that I don't like it when I've done this sort of thing before.

In Europe especially, I've done a bunch of lectures and things, and I don't like I don't like it when, you know, you're pinpointed as a Pulitzer Prize winner.

No, I was part of a Pulitzer Prize winning team.

However, many of those people who were part of the team go off and call themselves a Pulitzer Prize winner without qualifying it as part of a team.

It's a little bit disingenuous, but hey, you can do whatever you want to do.

I guess with that title you have an exhibit coming.

I do the Mad Hatter Gallery.

I'm very excited about it.

There's going to be an artist's reception this Friday at 5:00 on September 11th.

Correct.

And tell us about what the public can expect to see.

Well, they can expect to see, photographs from 911.

Obviously, my photograph, the as I said, the one, the one cityscape that I know of, that I know of that's going to be an exhibition.

It'll be a few photograph frame photographs by New York Times photographers who gifted these pictures to me.

And it's the gift.

So I'm, you know, I can show them and sell them if I wish.

the one photographer at Keating, as I mentioned, is no longer with us.

I and I can be hard to get permit, and there's no need to get permission because they belong to me.

That my property and, and as we mentioned before, I think the full page, the first proof to come off the press, I grabbed it and it's it's a proof of the page and we're mounting it and framing it.

And that's going to be rather spectacular.

People.

A lot of people kept the actual paper.

I have two copies at home of the nine, 11, nine, excuse me, September 12th paper, but no one has that proof.

And I was fortunate enough to, to keep it and hand it over to, to the Mad Hatter Gallery and, I must it's appropriate to pay.

Thanks for Penny and George.

The owners and curators of mad had a gallery without whom this would not be taken place.

I've had other exhibitions around the world, here and there of of my photography.

This is the first one pegged to 9/11 And how more appropriate can it be to the 25th anniversary?

Right, exactly.

And you're going to have additional photographs of other aspects of your.

Yes, there's going to be parts of your career.

Yeah.

I have they're calling in America.

I'm going to have from coast to coast, a lot of my best photos on display.

many of them will be on the wall, and I'll have a rack there with people can look through, all of the most of them are 17 by 22, and they're big, big prints, all.

And archival plastic sleeves.

So people can can rustle through them without leaving fingerprints on the on there.

Really?

They're all 100 year archival prints.

So I'm very proud of the collection that Matt had.

A gallery has.

Yeah.

I wanted to bring you back to you talked about you mentioned earlier that there was this sort of transition going on with the camera crew.

911 happen from film camera to digital camera.

Can you talk about what that was and did that impact how you covered?

it didn't necessarily impact the way we covered 911 and for those people who were shooting film, we took film for those who were shooting digital, we we took the disks back.

a few photographers, a few of the staff photographers were very reluctant.

They wanted the film.

They wanted to be able to make their prints in their own labs or in the labs at the New York Times, both in Washington and in New York.

And they they just objected to the whole concept of handing this, this world of photography over to digital.

But they all came around eventually.

And now, you know, these very same people have, have, digital like the cameras and they're very happy with them.

But the transition was, was, not maybe not as complicated as the transition from black and white to color took place just a few years before that.

So this was all sort of coming together and and to a expanded color newspaper and, the nation challenged, sections are really, funny that I did, except for I think it started on, on it took it took a while logistics at the times to figure out exactly where they were going to place the section.

I think it happened.

I think the first one was on September 13th.

I may be wrong by a day, but it didn't happen immediately.

There was no there was No Nation Challenge section on September 12th, that's for sure.

A few days later, when did you first become cognizant that you were creating this incredible documentation?

That was is really the first draft of history?

on the day of 911.

I mean, when I, I knew, I mean, I knew sitting there that day with all these pictures, that is something big was apart from the the calamity of the event, that something big was going to come from the New York Times, the record of the New York Times covering 911.

I mean, who where in the world could you find the better representation of that day than than The New York Times in New York?

And by the way, the the book, there will be, more than a dozen books, called A Nation Challenged.

It's a coffee table book.

And as you said, it was, it hit the bestseller list, the first, the first coffee table book to ever do so.

And some of them will be on sale, autographed and enscribed me at the gallery.

So that's, that's another thing that's I think people will be interested in looking at the book and hopefully buying them.

Okay.

Yeah.

And when tragedy occurs and everybody's in a flurry in a newsroom, I have found that you hear a lot from the public.

You get emails, phone calls, letters.

People are responding to what they're seeing.

You do.

Did you hear from the public and not me personally?

No.

Those calls, those calls were manned by several people at the news desk, the main news desk of the New York Times.

But I heard obviously, I know for a fact that they were inundated.

They called the calls that were coming in.

I mean, people I think people reaching out to the New York Times and sort of a cry of help before they could read that, tell me what this is all about, were frightened.

What's going on?

I you know, I remember people talking about those phone calls.

It just went on all day long and the next few days, too.

But they moved over a number of people, as I recall.

Onto the news, that's just to handle those phone calls.

Yeah, yeah.

It was such a pleasure to talk to you, Lonnie.

And I really look forward to seeing your work at the Mad Hatter Gallery this Friday.

Oh, thank you, Susan.

And it was a pleasure being here.

And I, I thank the, the staff of, of KRWG and the campus of, New Mexico State University.

And, I thank, again, Penny and George and Mad Hatter Gallery for making this all possible.

yeah.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

It's pleasure.

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