[alarms blaring] [somber piano music] [Vincent Brown] On September 11th, 2001, hijackers crashed two planes into New York's World Trade Center in the single deadliest terror attack in U.S. history.

I remember visiting friends in Manhattan soon afterward.

In the midst of the shock, disorientation, and the upwelling of grief, there was already a remarkable commemoration taking place.

Every few blocks, you could see pictures of the missing.

Flowers, candles, and coins piled up around the portraits.

But these weren't the most enduring images of the event.

Among the countless photographs taken that day, the most recognizable is probably this one: "Raising the Flag at Ground Zero."

This image of three New York City firefighters was published around the world, and quickly became a cultural phenomenon.

But it was not the only photograph of the flag raising taken that day.

So what made this one so powerful?

Why did it capture the public's imagination?

What did it mean to different people?

And what should it mean to us now?

[film reeling] [slow beating music] I've come to the Jersey City waterfront, across from lower Manhattan, to meet the person who took "Raising the Flag at Ground Zero."

So can you tell me what happened on that day?

[Thomas Franklin] So I was initially in the office, editor came running into the photo department and said a plane had crashed into World Trade.

[Vincent Brown] Franklin grabbed his camera and drove here to the waterfront.

[Thomas Franklin] It was an incredibly dramatic scene.

And this huge plume of smoke...

The sky was, like, as blue as could be.

It was just... unlike anything I had ever seen.

[Vincent Brown] After photographing the scene from a distance, Franklin took a police boat across the river.

[Thomas Franklin] It was surreal.

The entire landscape was just filled with debris, like shards of metal, and everything was covered in this gray dust.

[Vincent Brown] So how did you get the photograph?

Where were you when you took it?

[Thomas Franklin] I saw these three firemen out of the corner of my eye, fumbling with the flag about 30 yards away.

So I quickly moved over into position, got my- changed my lens, and... you know, in a very short amount of time they hoisted the flag up the pole.

I shot a burst of pictures -- I think I shot a series of about 24 pictures in less than two minutes.

[Vincent Brown] Among them, one frame stood out: an eye-level shot foregrounding the three firefighters, with the American flag midway up the pole.

[suspenseful bass music] Here at the 9/11 Memorial Museum, I'm meeting the person who decided how to use a vast collection of media to tell the story of that day.

Why do you think that image became so popular so immediately?

[Jan Ramirez] I think it became popular because it was, first of all, "the shot seen 'round the world."

There was a tremendous strategy to when it was released to the AP Wire.

[Vincent Brown] After Franklin had finished shooting, he sent 40 different images back to his photo editor, who selected the flag raising as the most distinctive.

The Record published it, then quickly offered it to the Associated Press, who made it available globally.

For those viewers who saw it circulate around the world so immediately, what do you think was important to them?

[Jan Ramirez] You know, the morning images that people tended to have seen were of buildings, of fireballs, of utterly incomprehensible wreckage -- but not particularly of people.

These are: People are back.

People are back, trying to do something purposeful.

I think it represents fortitude, and, in a certain way, brotherhood -- you know, the power of collective action, which you see here.

[Vincent Brown] The appeal of this image also intrigues Fred Ritchin, Dean Emeritus of the school at the ICP and former photo editor for the New York Times Magazine.

[Fred Ritchin] That's one reason it was so popular, because it was like a- a victory: "We won.

It's okay.

It'll be okay."

[Vincent Brown] But this wasn't the only image taken of the flag raising.

Two other photographers had also captured it from very different angles.

There were a lot of images taken.

Why do you think it was this image that became iconic?

- These images give the sense of these people being dwarfed by the size of the destruction.

And the Ricky Flores image looking down at the guys as they're trying to raise the flag, and it's not an uplifting image -- it's a struggle to lift the flag.

I think the Lori Grinker image is asking a lot of questions about, you know, is America gonna emerge from this?

It's a probing interrogation of the event and the future.

You know, it's, "We have a long road ahead of us.

This is horrific.

This is enormous destruction.

This is apocalyptic."

And it asks the question, "Are we gonna be able to prevail?"

And I think the Franklin image is all about resilience, and all about, you know, "We're gonna win."

I think this very quickly resolved the pain.

[Vincent Brown] It was that promise of a quick victory that seems to have resonated with many Americans.

Almost as soon as it was published, the photograph took on a life of its own.

Here in New Jersey, Franklin and I have come to one of the storage areas for the 9/11 Memorial Museum.

It contains artifacts from the day of the attack, as well as items collected afterward.

[Thomas Franklin] In the weeks and months and even years after 9/11, that image was like a cultural phenomenon.

You couldn't walk anywhere in New York City without somebody trying to sell you stuff.

You know, it was reproduced in photographs and paintings and murals and statues and coffee cups, because people couldn't get enough of it.

- So here we have a lot of representations of what happened with this image, how people used it.

And it's interesting what they did with it -- here, right, they've added a soldier with a gun.

- Yeah.

[somber piano music] Yeah, it transforms it a little bit there.

- Mhmm.

The addition of a soldier suggests another reason the image caught the public's imagination: its similarity to this famous World War II photo taken by Joe Rosenthal.

[Thomas Franklin] I remember when I was making the picture, recognizing that it had a visual similarity to Rosenthal's picture, but... my photograph happened like a play in football: I saw it, - Yeah.

- I got into position, chose the right lens, and responded to what I saw.

But it was really just a coincidental thing.

[Vincent Brown] The Rosenthal photograph captures six U.S. Marines raising a flag during the Battle of Iwo Jima, a crucial turning point in the Pacific conflict.

The image played an important role in renewing public commitment to the war at a time when support was wavering.

It appeared on 137 million commemorative stamps, helped the U.S. raise $26 billion for the war effort, and provided the model for the Marine Corps Memorial in Washington, D.C. 50 years later, the Ground Zero flag raising photo had a similar galvanizing effect.

It not only helped to raise significant funds for the victims of 9/11, but also helped foster support for a war.

That's the conclusion drawn by Guy Westwell, a scholar who has studied the similarity between the two images.

So what consequences do you see that resonance between and among those images?

[Guy Westwell] The American government at that time wanted to move to a war footing and it needed to take the people of America with it.

In the case of these photographs, they call on arguably just wars of the past, so, "World War II is necessary," and therefore it logically follows that the wars that follow 9/11 are necessary.

[Vincent Brown] In this context, the New York City firefighters echo soldiers from 50 years earlier, reinforcing the idea that a military response to 9/11 was required, and helping to pave the way for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that followed.

[Guy Westwell] The photograph doesn't work completely in isolation.

The news coverage was already referring to it as a war.

Pearl Harbor was a key reference point.

But as the photograph comes into play, it consolidates and reiterates and becomes a sort of pivot point.

So all the nationalist energies that feed into and reinforce that jingoistic sense of, "Now we must wage war," flow through the image.

They're channeled by it in a way that makes war seem like the correct choice.

Photographs, they're very effective technologies of persuasion, because they're seemingly just documentary artifacts, and yet they're relaying all these historical reference points and pulling into play this particular, quite limited, understanding of how history works.

[Vincent Brown] Do you think that in some ways this is an image of a war to come?

[Jan Ramirez] You know, I mean, you can look at pictures from the moment.

- Mm.

- From the day.

And then with the benefit, or curse, of hindsight.

And so we can also look at this photograph and say this sets up what happens for the next 20 years.

- Mm.

- There is going to be a response.

Whether you wanted war or not, it became a military response.

It became the "War on Terror."

And 20 years later, [inhales] you know, you can say did it or didn't it... achieve its objectives, but it defines the next two decades of this 21st century.

[Vincent Brown] So it sounds like you're saying this image has become so iconic that people don't know the story behind it, - which makes it so powerful.

- Right.

Well, that's what happens with icons, right?

They get divorced from their context.

And our job as historians and curators here is to anchor this back to the truth of actually what happened, when it happened, to whom it happened.

[somber piano music] [Thomas Franklin] You know, there's a certain responsibility that comes along with having taken pictures that are part of the public consciousness.

At one point, the photograph was being used by the U.S. military in Afghanistan, in some capacity, they were handing out leaflets with the photograph on it.

I didn't think that was a really appropriate use of the photograph at the time.

I mean, how many years later are we now?

I still receive letters and emails from people, you know, telling me what the picture means to them.

And, you know, that's pretty incredible that after all this time, you know, people could look at that picture and get that kind of emotional response from it.

For me, that picture will always represent thousands of people who died horrifically on one of the worst days in our history.

[somber piano music] [Vincent Brown] A picture's meaning doesn't have a single author.

When an image speaks to people's deepest emotions, they often make it their own and they can compel it to say what they need it to say.

Thomas Franklin's photo distilled a powerfully heroic symbolism from a confusing and catastrophic day.

But when the image became iconic, it eclipsed the circumstances of its creation.

The bigger picture may be in the background, not the foreground -- in the lives lost and our struggle to remember them.

[inquisitive string music]