They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and I believe it. Images have the power to shape public opinion, even to shift history. In my work as a New York City tour guide, I’ve seen firsthand how photographs bring the past to life. For all their side effects, smartphones have made photographic memories more widely accessible than ever before. We are uniquely wealthy in snapshots of who we used to be, milestones showing how far we’ve come.
Recently I began searching through photo archives of the September 11, 2001, attacks in New York City. I wanted to see if I could find any visual record of my husband and myself from that day.
Although I have been telling our story for years—as an author and a tour guide and a speaker at schools and libraries and churches across the country—I still sometimes feel the need to prove we were there that day. I wanted a witness: some reassurance that we mattered, that our story counts. I asked God to help me find the photographic evidence I thought I needed. As has happened so often in my life, God did provide reassuring evidence, just not the kind I expected.
Finding a photo or footage struck me as a real possibility because we were there. We watched the second jet ram into the South Tower from the balcony of our apartment just six blocks from the World Trade Center complex. Our frantic attempt to put distance between us and the burning towers took us through downtown streets and into the toxic debris cloud when the towers crumbled.
We remember the smell, the shock, the sound of buildings collapsing, the panicked shrieks from frightened people all around us. But memory, especially when shaped by trauma, can blur with time. I’ve found myself longing for something more concrete—something outside myself.
Although most Americans who lived through that day carry searing mental snapshots, footage from 9/11 is surprisingly scarce, especially compared to the flood of visual documentation we’d have if a comparable tragedy happened today. In 2001, cell phones in the USA were rudimentary, with bad service and no cameras, and few fleeing the attacks grabbed cameras on their way out the door. Only one known video has a clear shot of the first plane hitting the North Tower.
I started my search for images of us with a deep dive on YouTube. One clip stopped me cold.
A photographer filming the burning North Tower panned to our building, 21 West Side Highway. (I’ve circled and annotated it in the footage.) My husband Brian and I aren’t visible, but I know we were on our balcony at that very moment. I know because we were still there when a passenger jet flew directly overhead, and this footage shows that plane hitting the South Tower seconds after the photographer panned to our building.
The clip was shot by acclaimed Canadian artist and academic Luc Courchesne, who happened to be in New York at the time. It brought my memories back in sharp, almost-unbearable detail: the roar of the second jet, the maneuver before impact to cause maximum damage, the shock of witnessing it all at such close range.
It was the second strike that sent me into a full-blown panic that day. I bolted down 24 flights of stairs, barefoot in a nightgown, with Brian close behind, carrying our terrified Boston terrier, Gabriel. We ran to the southern tip of Manhattan, as far as we could get from the towers, unsure of what would happen next.
When the buildings collapsed, a cloud of pulverized debris blotted out the sky. It felt like stumbling blind through a toxic snow globe. Struggling to breathe, Brian and I clung to each other and recited the Lord’s Prayer aloud together. Certain the end had come, I felt the ache of a faith I’d let fade since childhood, its absence sharpest when I needed God’s comfort most.
Unbeknownst to us then, Courchesne had kept his camera rolling and was submerged in the dust cloud right alongside us—seeing what we saw, feeling what we felt. Again his footage stunned me. I couldn’t believe he had the presence of mind to keep recording amid such horror.
We didn’t appear in this video either, yet it gave me a visual record of what we’d endured, something I’d never had before. It deepened my determination to keep searching, too, so I sought and received permission to comb through the archives of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum.
The collection houses over 81,000 artifacts and continues to grow as more people choose to share what they’ve saved, everything from first responders’ hardhats to Tupperware filled with dust from the collapse. I thought of my own ziplock bag of charred paper scraps that had blown into our apartment. I’m not ready to donate them. At least not yet.
When I arrived at the museum offices, an archivist led me to a quiet conference room where she projected videos and photos onto a large screen. She’d selected these images based on the path we’d taken before we had been unexpectedly evacuated from Manhattan by boat and taken to safety in New Jersey. Among them was footage filmed by a tugboat deck hand, Ralph Gundersen, who in 2019 donated a rarely seen video of his participation in the 9/11 boat rescue.
Then just 21, Gundersen was aboard the Dory B, one of the first boats on the scene. He filmed the rescue with a Sony camcorder as his boat filled. Courchesne, too, captured scenes of boarding.
I cried as I watched dogs being handed off from the docks, remembering how Brian lowered Gabriel down to strangers before we jumped aboard a New York Waterway ferry. He was covered in the same dust as we were, licking the debris from his fur and clawing at his eyes. The toxins, which included ground glass, ravaged his throat and lungs. He barely made it through the following days and suffered lasting effects until his death several years later.
I increasingly suspect I too suffered lasting effects: I was diagnosed with uterine cancer in March, one of nearly 70 illnesses now tied to 9/11 exposure. This year has been filled with doctor appointments and surgeries, reinforcing to me that the toxic clouds of 9/11 are not just a memory from my past but a part of my present.
Gundersen’s footage was raw and moving, but though the clip showed the tugboat docking very near to where we boarded our ferry, we weren’t visible in this video either.
Two weeks after the archives visit, I returned to the museum for a screening of Dust: The Lingering Legacy of 9/11. The 2021 documentary includes rare footage of survivors walking unmasked through the toxic cloud, unaware of the danger they were breathing. More people have died from 9/11-related illnesses than died in the attacks themselves, the documentary reported. Cameras are still capturing that day’s effects more than two decades on.
This summer, I watched hours of 9/11 videos and combed through countless stills from every angle. I saw chaos, compassion, grief, survival. I saw echoes of our story. But I did not see us.
I wanted to see myself in a picture to show that we’d been there. That our story mattered. That our suffering was real. I thought a photographic record could prove those truths to others. Maybe I even needed an image to prove that to myself. No photographic proof arrived.
But after all those hours of searching, I came to believe no proof was needed to verify the most important truth: God had seen us that day.
When we ran down those stairs, when we prayed in the dust cloud, when we held our frightened dog, when we boarded the boat—he saw us. And he sees us still.
In Scripture, the act of being seen by God is often a turning point. Hagar, abandoned in the wilderness, names God El Roi—“the God who sees me” (Gen. 16:13). When no one else saw her, he did. That divine seeing was enough to carry her forward, and it is enough for me too.
After the attacks, Brian and I were invited to Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, where we quickly became deeply involved. In time, Brian joined the church staff while I led short-term international mission trips for more than a decade. On those trips, I began sharing my testimony—how God met us at our lowest point on the day of 9/11—and often returned to the verse that became my anchor, Galatians 2:20.
Over the years, I’ve come to treasure sharing what God has done in our lives, grateful to be a witness to his glory. Twenty-four years later, I continue to tell my testimony whenever I can—because I’ve seen firsthand the hope and healing found in God’s love.
Our testimony, like every Christian’s, is sacred—not because a camera caught it but because Christ transformed it. What matters most can’t be frozen in a frame; it lives in our hearts and our changed lives. To testify is to remember what God has done, even when the world forgets. And we trust that the God who redeems is also the God who remembers.
I went looking for photographic evidence of our presence that day. What I found instead was a deeper truth: I am a witness. The power of my story is revealed in how God guided us, strengthened us, loved us through the hardest days. On 9/11 and all the days after.
God is still writing my story, one day at a time, and because of him, I know I am seen. I know I matter. And I know my story counts.
The Cameras Missed Me on 9/11
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Christina Stanton and her husband two weeks before the attacks.
Image courtesy of Christina Stanton.
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Christina Stanton and her husband two weeks after the 9/11 attacks.
Image courtesy of Christina Stanton.
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A special thanks to the 9/11 Memorial & Museum collection and the gifts of Rodney G. JeanBaptiste and Ralph Gundersen, as well as Nimia Kurator and Luc Courchesne.
Christina Ray Stanton wrote an award-winning memoir of her 9/11 experience. A licensed NYC guide since 1995, she is among the few tour guides still active who toured the World Trade Center both before and after 9/11.
