This interview produced by Dave Frank at New England Public Media, appeared on the program, Connecting Point, on Sept. 10, 2021, the day before the 20th anniversary.  I often wonder how and why everything transpired the way it did on one of the worst days of my life.

For 24 years I’ve been that guy who took that picture on 9/11.

I go to parties and that’s how people introduce me. It makes you question if that email you received that said “you were put on the planet to take this picture” was true.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I raced to the roof of my apartment building in Brooklyn opposite the Twin Towers, camera in tow, after my wife, who was watching TV, told me it seemed a small plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Or so we thought.

Minutes later, with the crash of a second plane, we realized that we were witnessing one of the biggest man-caused disasters in human history. But at that moment, I switched into photojournalist mode, capturing images of the horror before us. Shot with an early Olympus digital camera, the Twin Towers fully engulfed in dark black smoke was one of the first views transmitted by the Associated Press. The image was printed on the front pages of newspapers around the country and the world. None of us involved in its distribution noticed anything beyond the horror of the buildings on fire.

Then, the phone began ringing.

My picture went viral when we didn’t know what that word meant. My camera, you see, captured something that, in my determination to perform my job, I had missed. It was a face in the smoke.

Or was it?

It was the early days of the Internet. There was almost no social media, AI was science fiction. The iPhone had yet to be produced. In these primitive days, email was king. From out of these embers, that face stared. It would not be ignored.

Everyone who saw the photo had an opinion. Some saw the devil. Or Osama bin Laden. Others saw Santa Claus.

In the month after 9/11, I received over 25,000 email messages all about Satan in the Smoke. My e-book, Satan in the Smoke? A Photojournalist’s 9/11 Story, looked at those emails and now, two decades on, I’m looking at them again.

Satan in the Smoke? A Photojournalist’s 9/11 Story by Mark D Phillips

There were messages of faith.

There were messages of fear.

There were messages of incredulity.

I was sure never to judge. People were free to see whatever they wanted to see in these light and dark wisps of smoke.. Or nothing at all.

And then, it hit me. Maybe I was put on the planet to take this picture.

I became a photojournalist for one reason. I wanted to take a photograph that everyone remembered. Sometimes getting what you wished for isn’t always what you expect.

From the start, there were those who wanted it to be a political statement. Major news organizations accused me of creating the image to make an anti-Arab statement. People I respected didn’t even have the decency to speak to me before they came out against it. Worst of all, I was accused of doctoring it, and forced to prove it was real.

For me, photography was more than a career. It is a calling.. I have photographed more death than I can even recall. The pictures I like to look back on are the ones that show life at its fullest. But this is definitely in the death category. In all the interviews I did afterwards, I tried to bring it back to the reality that we were watching some 3,000 perish.

Every year, I stop what I am doing and watch the 9/11 service and listen to every name that is read. I have watched as the networks shorten coverage of the event, to the point we rely on streaming services to play the event from beginning to end. They didn’t exist in 2001.