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I wasn’t sure where exactly to go this morning. The memorial ceremony itself was held adjacent to Ground Zero, but only a handful of photographers are let in down there. So I walked in a circle for a few hours, back and forth between Broadway at the famous St. Paul’s Chapel that survived 9/11, and the plaza on the edge of Ground Zero where tourists come to peek through the fence and photograph themselves next to history.

9/11 was of course a quintessential American tragedy, and we continue to commemorate the day in American ways. A street musician blew sonorous tunes on some sort of traditional African horn, then gave out Christian tracts to those who would stop to listen. A large gang of conspiracy theorists, complete with custom T-shirts, alleged that the attacks were commissioned by the US government. A woman bowed her head next to a sign that appealed for world peace. Three young women that were identical triplets donned costumes and began a work of performing art. Cops shouted for people to move along when they lingered in a lane of traffic.

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Booming in the background while I walked around and photographed was the sounds from the memorial ceremony itself, especially the annual rite of reading all the names of those who died from the terrorist attacks. I’ve photographed this unhappy anniversary a few times before, and the names recitative still hasn’t lost it’s power; the sheer enormity of the list is more clear when you hear the names over course of four hours, sometimes seeming like it will go on forever. The names were read over a background of music, much of it Bach: the D minor partita for violin, one of the flute sonatas, others. Somehow Bach is perfectly appropriate in times of crisis across the centuries; those simple scales and chords speak to the implicit emotional truths of our lives, truths that words cannot tell.

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I’ve probably been to the Ground Zero site 60 or so times since 9/11/01 and visiting each new time is like watching an old photograph age and fade away. Of course I’ll never forget those first horrific days, but returning to the site now leaves very little context of what went on that Tuesday morning. There is still a giant hole in the ground but it is now just a construction site.

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Greenwich Street, which I sprinted down trying to outrun the tornado of dust and debris as the South Tower fell, now is just like any other Manhattan avenue, with shops, taxis, parking garages and Wall Street types hustling past on the sidewalk. I shot a ceremony outside a firehouse this morning where the firefighters observed moments of silence at the times the planes struck the towers.

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The paradox of the cleanup and recovery is that there are very few symbols remaining of what happened that day. I spent last week down at the site shooting for a multimedia piece on what Ground Zero looks and feels like now. I recall as a kid being taken to a Civil War battlefield by my father one day and complaining to him that there was nothing to see. I’m pretty sure most visitors to Ground Zero now feel like I did that day at Antietam.

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