A photographer’s final moments on 9/11 – and the last shot he took
Bill Biggart ran for his cameras when the first World Trade Center tower was hit; his shots were developed after his death. Twenty-five years later, they have been added to the Imperial War Museum collection
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On the morning of 11 September 2001, the photographer Bill Biggart and his wife,Wendy Doremus, were walking their dog through Union Square in Manhattan, New York.
“It was a beautiful day,” Doremus recalled. “Everyone will remember the colour of the sky. It was absolutely crystal-clear blue, a lovely dark blue, and there was just that puff of a cloud that was coming up between the buildings.”
When a passing cab driver leaned out of his window and told the pair a plane had just hit the World Trade Center, they assumed it was an accident. Biggart went home and grabbed his cameras, which he always kept by his bedside, and ran 20 blocks to what would soon become known as Ground Zero.
‘Getting the camera back was almost more emotionally devastating than getting Bill’s body back. That was his life, his soul in his images’
After watching the news, Doremus tried desperately to call her husband to tell him it was a terrorist attack. Eventually she got through and he told her: “I’m with the firemen, I’m safe, I’ll see you in 20 minutes.”
Minutes later the second tower fell. She never saw him again.
Biggart was the only professional photographer to die on 9/11 . He was 54 years old.
The days that followed the attacks, and his death, were “very confusing,” said Doremus, 75. Her husband’s body was not found for four days.
“I figured we had to have a funeral, and then it dawned on me: ‘Wait a second, I didn’t get anything back, he had all his camera gear with him. Where is it? Did it get blown up? Something happened to it.’”
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Wendy called the police, who sent her to the mortuary, where – miraculously – all of her husband’s equipment was waiting. “Getting the cameras back was almost more emotionally devastating than getting Bill’s body back,” she said. “That was Bill’s life, that was his soul in his images. The essence of Bill.”
At first, Doremus didn’t know what to do with the cameras. “It was pretty brutal to see how destroyed they were. I was devastated,” she said.
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She feared trying to develop the film would be fruitless, but enlisted the help of Biggart’s friend, the photographer Chip East, who managed to open them and extract the reel from the film cameras and the memory card from the other.
A photograph from Biggart’s camera taken at 09.59, before the second tower collapsed
Out of the 300 images he shot, 154 images were recovered, the last of which was taken at 10.28.24, just seconds before the second tower collapsed. His photos, taken right at the base of the towers in the middle of the attacks, show the best and the worst of humanity, Doremus said.
There are firemen covered in snowlike ash. Smoke billows from collapsing buildings. A policeman runs across the street as office paper rains down from above.
“The last shot puts chills through my spine,” Doremus said. The photograph shows heavy damage caused to other buildings near the World Trade Center. Clouds of ash partially block out the sun.
“We normally [might] see somebody die, but we don’t see what they saw when they died. And that’s that last shot. You’re looking through his eyes, through the lens,” she said.
This week, Biggart’s photographs were added to the permanent collection at the Imperial War Museum in London. Below is a selection of the last images found on Biggart’s camera in the area surrounding the World Trade Center.
“I genuinely feel we’ve uncovered a great photographer that perhaps the world had missed,” said Cambridge Jones, a photographer whose recent Radio 4 Artworks programme about Biggart, Last Frames: The Story of Bill Biggart , is available on BBC Sounds.
Doremus thinks her husband would be happy with the renewed interest in his work, though the memories she has had to revisit are difficult. “I hope it helps other people realise what went on that day,” she said. “Bill was courageous and fearless in his efforts to get the story. And he used to say, ‘If you have fear, then you can’t do this kind of work’.”
Bill Biggart and his wife Wendy
Biggart had photographed conflict for years across the world: he met Palestinians in the West Bank; was beaten up by British soldiers during the troubles in Northern Ireland; and mobbed by protesters who thought he was an FBI officer while covering the Native American protest movement – then arrested by the FBI for being a protester. “He was always getting caught in both sides of the story,” Doremus said. “It’s ironic that it would be in New York that he would have his final assignment. He got in a lot of trouble in other countries.”
Biggart was born in Berlin, a fierce pacifist whose father was a conservative army officer. His family fled on one of the last trains out of the city before the Berlin Wall went up. Doremus thinks this start always drew him back to conflict. Decades after his family fled, he was back in Berlin to photograph the wall coming down.
His final assignment on 9/11 also coincided with a watershed moment. “When he was born, it was the beginning of the Cold War,” Doremus said. “When he died, it was the end of that Cold War and the beginning of a new age of conflict.”
The morning of 11 September in real time
10.28.24 – This was the last photograph Bill Biggart took before he died.
All photographs courtesy of the estate of Bill Biggart