Helping to tell the world

	New York Times staff photographer Ruth Fremson, a former Ohio University graduate student, was on the scene at the World Trade Center minutes before the first tower collapsed. She took this photo as aid workers assisted a victim. Photo courtesy of The New York Times

Many photojournalists who studied at Ohio University spent the past few months covering the aftermath of Sept. 11. Graduate student Uma Sanghvi contacted three who were on the scene at the World Trade Center and Pentagon immediately after the attacks --Lynn Johnson and Ruth Fremson, former graduate students in the School of Visual Communication, and Heather Hughes, who earned a bachelor's degree in visual communication in 2000.

Johnson turned on the car radio for a traffic report and learned that the World Trade Center had been hit. With airports around the country immediately shut down, she drove straight to New York, arriving at 10:30 p.m.

"It was surreal," she recalls. "The smell in the air was intense. The fires were still burning." As Johnson photographed the area around Ground Zero, she was moved by others who shared the experience. She took photos alongside a colleague who had lost two friends in the attack. "We would shoot, and then we'd cry. And then shoot some more, then cry some more. And then cry with total strangers. That was the most powerful thing," she says, "the connection with absolute strangers."

A staff photographer for The New York Times, Ruth Fremson was in Queens photographing voters at the polls during the mayoral primary when her office paged her with news that a plane had hit the north tower of the World Trade Center. As she rushed to the scene, she heard a live radio account of a plane hitting the south tower. She arrived minutes before the first tower collapsed.

"I thought another plane was going to hit," she wrote in a first-person story that appeared in The New York Times the Sunday after the attacks. "I looked up, trying to photograph the building, and realized it was imploding."

As screaming people streamed past her, Fremson held her ground until firefighters and other emergency personnel also started to flee.

"We were engulfed by a tidal wave of black dust," wrote Fremson, who rolled under a police van just in time to escape the torrent of debris. "I couldn't breathe, and I wondered for a second if this was what death was like."

Heather Hughes responded to a TV report of the disaster at the Pentagon, arriving just 15 minutes after a jet plowed into the west side of the building.

Hughes, a photographer for Times Community Newspapers in Reston, Va., was at a gym four miles from the Pentagon when she learned of the attack. She drove as close to the building as she could, then ran nearly a mile to the scene. She arrived as crews loaded burn victims into helicopters and employees calmly evacuated the structure.

"You could tell there was a hole (in the building), but the smoke was a dark black color and it obstructed the view," Hughes says. She could see the damage more clearly when she returned the following day.

"It was such a clean cut. I was able to make out a computer sitting on someone's desk, which was a strange sight considering the destruction," she says. "It was almost like they had sliced right through so you could see all of the offices that were there."

In an account by Hughes on the National Press Photographers Association Web site, she writes: "I remember racing back to the office to make already-missed deadlines and fighting back the tears. ... I decided to photograph the Pentagon at sunrise on Sept. 13, and the red sky that welcomed me seems appropriate."

Uma Sanghvi