A Sydney Photographer Is Exhibiting Never-Before-Seen Photos From the Week After 9/11

Twenty-five years ago, Sydney photographer North Sullivan was on a rooftop in New York, cup of tea in hand, when the first plane hit the North Tower. What he did in the days that followed wasn’t chase the story everyone else was chasing.

While the world’s cameras stayed locked on Ground Zero, Sullivan turned his lens the other way – towards the streets, the strangers, the missing person posters taped to lampposts and shopfronts, and the quiet, unglamorous business of a city trying to keep going.

Now, for the first time, 186 of those black-and-white photographs are coming together in When The Dust Settled, a new exhibition at The Photo Studio in Glebe. It’s an unpublished, deeply personal record of a week most of us only ever saw through news footage – this time from ground level, among the people who actually lived it.

The show opens with a photo of two NYPD officers on a rooftop the evening before the attacks, Twin Towers still standing in the background. From there, it moves through the days that follow: empty streets, impromptu memorials, strangers leaning on each other, and – eventually – Downtown cautiously reopening as the Stock Exchange resumes trading. It’s less a document of destruction than a visual diary of a city inching its way back towards normal.

“I wasn’t interested in photographing the spectacle,” Sullivan says. “I wanted to photograph the people who were left behind and what happened to a city after the cameras moved on.”

Sullivan’s since built a career most photographers would love to claim as their own – the original Qantas Children’s Choir campaign, the Olympic Torch Relay billboard, multiple Tourism Australia campaigns – with work shown at the National Portrait Gallery, the Art Gallery of NSW and the Powerhouse Museum. But this collection has sat unseen for a quarter of a century, until now.

Twenty-five years on, it’s a rare chance to sit with a piece of history most of us know only in headlines and archive footage – and to see it, instead, through the small, human moments that got left out of the story.