David Handschuh, a New York Daily News photographer, will present a visual lecture at Wagner College about covering the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. His presentation, “A Survivor’s Story,” will be given on Thursday, April 17 at 7 p.m. in Spiro Hall, Room 2. The public is invited.
Handschuh wasn’t supposed to start his Daily News shift until 5 p.m. on Sept. 11, 2001. On his way to teach a class at NYU that sunny morning, he heard two calls on the police scanner about an explosion and fire at the World Trade Center. He headed downtown to the site, arriving before many of the emergency crews, and started snapping photos of the first tower.
“The sounds were very eerie: glass breaking, people silently running, cars burning, and occasionally a body hitting the pavement — a sound that I will never forget,” he has recalled.
When terrorists slammed an airliner into the second tower, Handschuh was pinned on the ground by debris, seriously injured with a shattered leg. Rescue workers pulled him to safety seconds before more debris covered the spot where he had fallen.
DAVID HANDSCHUH has been a staff photographer at the Daily News since 1986. He has been nominated several times for a Pulitzer Prize, and has received awards for his photography from the Pictures of the Year Competition, the New York Press Photographers Association, the New York Press Club, the Society of Silurians, the Deadline Club and many police, fire and EMS organizations. He is a former president of the 10,000-member National Press Photographers Association.
A 1999 recipient of a DART Fellowship to study the effects of trauma on visual journalists, Handschuh is co-author of “The National Media Guide For Emergency And Disaster Incidents,” a primer on establishing better relationships between the media and public safety providers.
Handschuh was a Poynter Institute Media Ethics Fellow for 2000-2001. He lectures frequently on digital photography, photojournalism and media/government relations, and has taught undergraduate and graduate photojournalism at NYU since 1995.
MORE ON THE WEB: To see and hear a set of video interviews with Handschuh about his 9/11 experience, CLICK HERE
