Camera Work, Berlin: Never Forget: September 11th, 2001

Running from 05.09.2026 – 02.10.2026, Camera Work Gallery presents Never Forget: September 11, 2001, a group exhibition marking the 25th anniversary of the attacks.

The exhibition brings together 40 selected works by fourteen renowned photographers, offering a collective view of New York's skyline as it once stood, and of the events that reshaped the city and the people who lived through them.

September 11, 2001 is one of those rare dates that needs no introduction. Mention it to almost anyone and they will tell you, unprompted, exactly where they were and what they were doing. Such is the nature of trauma, it embeds itself in our memory with a permanence that few moments in a lifetime ever achieve.

I know exactly where I was. About a kilometre away, at home in my brownstone on the corner of West 11th and Bleecker in New York City. I was on the phone when my photo assistant, Mia, came inside, took the phone from my hand mid-conversation. We climbed the fire escape stairs of the apartment building and stood on the rooftop. I looked up and, like everyone everywhere, I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing.

Photography is a core instinct for me. I climbed down and retrieved my medium format Pentax 67 camera with a 165 lens, and I photographed.

The camera requires cranking each frame manually. By the time I had shot a single roll of film, the scene deteriorated, from wondering whether I was somehow looking at a film set, to the dawning understanding that this was an extraordinary event on a scale yet to be revealed. At 9.08am I put the camera down.

The rest of that day was spent locating my partner, Ali, who was out working a mile away and seven months pregnant with our daughter Lola, then locating friends and family, and figuring out what I should do, donate blood or lend a hand at the site, however it was well beyond that.

It was only in the weeks that followed, when I finally processed that roll of film, that I came to understand something that has shaped my thinking ever since: the camera is something of a time machine. Two and a half decades have rolled on, and yet when I look at those photographs, for better or worse, the emotions and experience of that day come back instantly.

From a sense of history, I believe it is incredibly important to record it all. The good, the bad, and the ugly. It's the human experience. And these images are also an act of respect,  a way of remembering how many people did so many extraordinary things that day to reduce the loss of life and control the devastation.

Never Forget: September 11, 2001 runs at Camera Work, Kantstrasse 149, Berlin, September 5 through October 2, 2026.

These works are available for acquisition through Camera Work Gallery. View the exhibition