Imperial War Museum Exhibits Bill Biggart's 9/11 Photos for 25th Anniversary

Q: Why did a 9/11 victim's son choose a burning Jerusalem to memorialize a father who died at the World Trade Center?

He chose a burning Jerusalem because he wanted the memorial to reflect not only how his father died on 9/11, but what defined his life’s work. William Biggart said Jerusalem represented his father Bill Biggart’s years photographing the First Intifada in the West Bank, Gaza and refugee camps. To him, those images captured the elder Biggart’s central mission as a photojournalist: documenting injustice and standing with people he believed were oppressed or ignored by the powerful. William said that, “for him, it was always about injustice,” and that pairing Jerusalem with the other imagery “just kind of made sense.” The tattoo’s other central image, the Archangel Michael, carries a second layer of meaning tied to Biggart’s death at the World Trade Center. William said Saint Michael is a protector of soldiers, police officers and firefighters, and a figure who carries the fallen to heaven. That made him an apt symbol for a photographer who died while moving toward danger alongside first responders on Sept. 11, 2001. Taken together, the burning Jerusalem and Saint Michael were meant to show the full arc of Bill Biggart’s life: an Irish Catholic-born, pacifist photojournalist who covered conflict from Northern Ireland to Palestine and who ultimately died documenting the attacks in Lower Manhattan. His family has stressed that his final 9/11 photographs are historically important, but they do not want his legacy reduced to that day alone.

3 articles · Updated · Rolling Stone · Sep 11

London's Imperial War Museum is showing Bill Biggart's Sept. 11 photographs for the attacks' 25th anniversary, marking the first exhibition of his final work outside the United States.
Biggart was the only photographer killed when the towers fell; his last image was time-stamped 10:28:24 a.m., moments before the North Tower collapsed.
His widow Wendy Doremus had preserved the damaged cameras after the attacks, and the recovered memory card helped reveal Biggart's final path as he kept moving toward the World Trade Center.
For his family, the exhibition revives a private loss more than a public legacy: they have never sold the 9/11 images, though they will provide restricted prints to relatives identified in them.
The London show places those final pictures beside Associated Press photographer Suzanne Plunkett's work, extending Biggart's posthumous reach to a generation born after 2001.