The sky over Manhattan filled with smoke and, for a moment, no one understood what was happening. 🗽
When the first plane struck the North Tower, many New Yorkers thought it was a minor aviation accident, something strange but explainable. That is why, when the cameras started rolling, some posed smiling in front of the burning building: they believed they were witnessing the filming of a movie. Photographer Lyle Owerko later described it with a phrase that sums up that moment of collective confusion: he felt he was watching a “Hollywood film”.
Everything changed when the second plane struck the South Tower. At that moment, the minds of thousands of people had to accept within seconds that it was not fiction. That break between the initial disbelief and the real horror was captured in photos and videos that today are part of the memory of that morning in New York.