Marco Werman: You’re talking in very impressionistic images. Take us back to that morning. Where were you, and how did you find out about what was happening at the World Trade Center?

Well, it’s much as it is now. It was the end of the summer. I had a plan to see a friend who had been away, though we’d been in opposite directions, and we were going to meet at 9 o’clock, about a block and a half from my house, in a diner. I got there early, and I remember looking at the little television they had at the diner, and it was reporting on the first plane going into the tower. It seemed like an accident, so I didn’t take much notice. She didn’t show up at 9. And the next thing I saw was the second plane, because it was a live feed. And that’s the moment that I figured whatever was happening, I needed to go. Nobody had the idea yet who had driven the plane in, and no one imagined that the towers were going to fall down, which happened just as I was almost arriving on my bike. The second tower collapsed, and that really created a panic.

How overwhelming was it to try to capture the scale of what had happened at Ground Zero? I mean, how did you kind of try to fit it into your frame?

Do you think the overwhelming scale of the site kind of prompted you to look at more intimate kinds of spaces like the Double Check Man, or just like people staring?

Well, you can see where I was in relation to the Double Check sculpture, which was sitting within two or three blocks of the towers. So I was circling around the towers, trying to get any perspective I could, any entry point to have another view of what was happening. If you walked half a block in one direction, you’d see a group of men who had just gone into the tower and tried to rescue people who are collapsed on the sidewalk from exhaustion. You know, people’s clothing [was scattered] along the park. I just remember fragments, lots of fragments of what — it’s like a puzzle that you’re putting the little pieces together. We didn’t have the overview, a vision of how much hate there was at that moment, what America represented. I’m somebody who travels the world. I think the biggest shock was seeing the war here when I’ve gone to many wars elsewhere, right?

I was going to ask you about that because I know you said — I’m going to quote you …”The camera is an excuse to be someplace you otherwise don’t belong. It gives me both a point of connection and a point of separation.” Did you feel, in some strange way, that you didn’t belong down here that day, or did it feel different this time because, wow, war, something was happening to the US?

Well, I didn’t think I’d seen it happening to the US. New York usually had been, for the decade before, when I was working in Latin America, the place I came back to rest, recharge and kind of imagine my next place to be. So this was always a kind of place of retreat. And therefore, I think most Americans have the illusion that we’re safe, unlike Europeans who feel very interconnected and exposed depending on where events occur. You know, we’re fairly isolated from it, or we perceive [it that way] and pretend we’re protected. In any case, I think that was part of the shock.

Now, with the 25th anniversary, I’m curious what perspective you’ve gained on the event and what’s changed over the years. It’s a huge question, but, like, what comes to mind?

I think a lot about memory and how many people didn’t live through 9/11. Twenty-five years is enough of a gap for the youth to have no sense of the vulnerability we felt then. And perhaps some part of what American policy has acted differently since then.

I mean, it’s been more than a generation since 9/11. Do you worry that there are people — I mean, something that people talk about all the time — who forget history, and then what? Do you worry that people don’t really understand the legacy of 9/11?

I mean, how do you understand it? Look, we’re sitting here looking at Hank’s Pizza and the Burger King, and people are going about their lives. They’re not thinking about what’s happening in Ukraine, Gaza or Iran … or, you know, the contemporary wars that we’re involved in now. I look at these buildings that have been built, and it’s kind of the magnitude, the resilience of this determined nation to move on, to believe in the future, as most of us hope for. But it’s not a peaceful time. I feel the conflict that unfolded was the beginning of a deep, deep culture of conflict that we have been in now for decades. I mean, it’s not to say there weren’t conflicts before 9/11. It feels to me like a divide in where we are in the world, who we want to be in the world, how we want to see ourselves in the world, the kind of harmony that the world doesn’t have — that maybe I was deluded then, but I thought we were still striving for it then.

For documentary photographers like yourself and for journalists, at the end of the day, so much of it is about just bearing witness. And I wonder: if you hadn’t been in New York, if you’d been on assignment somewhere else, would you have regretted that?