Twelve years ago today, Cary Conover, currently a photojournalism lecturer at Wichita State, was armed with a camera to capture the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in New York.

He was freelancing for the New York Times, The Village Voice and other publications at the time of the attacks. Conover had lived in New York for 13 months.

“I felt the city was something where everyday, you could discover something new,” Conover said.

The night before the attacks, Conover was at an event called “Punk Night/Karaoke” at a bar.

Conover said he probably got home by midnight and soon fell asleep.

Noises from “usual morning occurrences” woke Conover up twice that morning. He considered not responding to the knock at his door.

“In hindsight, it sounded kinda urgent,” he said. He opened the door to his neighbor, Gavin Creel, who still had shaving cream on his face.

“I think his words were, ‘A plane just hit the World Trade Center, you gotta go upstairs’” Conover said.

At first, he thought the situation was not as urgent as it was. He said he thought maybe a little Cessna plane had accidentally hit the tower.

‘What the heck just happened?’

Conover grabbed his camera and went to the roof of his apartment building shortly before 9 a.m., a few minutes after the first plant hit the North Tower. He lived about a mile away from the World Trade Center.

He shot two frames of the North Tower burning before backing up to try and get a wider shot. He recalls calling a neighbor, but said it was futile.

Then he saw the explosion of United Airlines Flight 175 flying into the South Tower at 9:02 a.m. Conover reacted by taking a split second to make sure the focus on his camera was good.

“My instinct was not to press, but to focus and press,” Conover said. “The motor drive was probably 10 frames. Right after that, it was like, ‘What the heck just happened?’”

The others on the building’s roof screamed as the South Tower erupted in a fireball. Conover took a few more frames to capture the flames’ redness. A few seconds later, he heard “a prolonged crashing sound.”

“It would have been an initial boom, followed by just crinkling, almost like an eruption,” Conover said. “At that point, it was kinda, ‘I guess that was intentional.’ I mean, I didn’t see the plane coming. I just saw an explosion.”

From there, Conover made his way into Lower Manhattan. When he reached Chambers and Church streets, he found a large gathering of people blocking the intersection.

Nearby, Conover heard passerby talking about people jumping from the towers.

“I guess something inside me told me not to look or was still in shock,” Conover said. “It was just so extreme, that nothing would have been shocking at that point. You didn’t even think.”

Continuing through town

Conover arrived at the Brooklyn Bridge around 9:45 a.m.

“It was slow going,” he said, “just people walking all over it. It was a mass exodus of people just walking on the bridge. At that point, it still felt very under control. It felt like a fire drill, almost.”

Conover said he remembers thinking he had no business going into Brooklyn, and that’s when he decided to turn around and head back into Manhattan. That’s when he heard screams all around him. The South Tower was collapsing.

“I turned around and clicked twice, and had a little moment of ‘Holy shit, what’s happening?’” Conover said. “I think that was when, as I was absorbing it, that it went sort of to a whole new level.”

Conover described the sound from the tower collapsing as a crumbling sound. He said people all around him on the bridge were saying they had to get off the bridge, because it could be hit next.

“It was real pandemonium, just people shrieking and I think people were just grabbing whoever was close,” Conover said.

He made his way back to his apartment, pushing his way through the narrow pedestrian entrance of the bridge. When the North Tower collapsed, he missed seeing it, but heard the echoes between the tall buildings he was walking around.

Back at his apartment, Conover went back to the roof and saw a TV for the first time. He said that’s when he realized at least one plane had been involved.

Aftermath

About noon, Conover took his film to a photography laboratory to get his prints developed. He saw some Swedish-looking tourists admiring a photo of the World Trade Center at the laboratory.

“I was telling them, ‘Did you guys get pictures of this?’ and they had no idea what I was talking about,” he said. “I was like, ‘Yeah, these towers are no more.’”

Conover spent the rest of the day emailing people, telling them he was fine and sending his photographs to clients. He said he couldn’t get away from what was happening.

“You were just kinda glued to the TV,” he said.

Since January 2011, Conover has been the photojournalism instructor at Andover High School. He is also a lecturer for introduction to photojournalism at the Elliott School of Communication.

Conover said he has no regrets about his choices that day, which included the camera he used.

“I think something in my training made me grab the color film as opposed to my black and white Nikon camera,” Conover said. “I don’t regret it. I was there to document it, not make artistic critiques about how I did it.”