Photographer shares unusual view of twin towers before 9/11

It was a photo that anyone might have taken. In the years leading to Sept. 11, 2001, Americans took to the skies like never before, numbering in the millions, taking in the bird's-eye view above the clouds. Katie Weisberger, a freshman in the photography program at New York University, was flying back from her home in Richmond, Virginia. She had a Nikon 35 mm film camera at the ready when the twin towers came into view.

Weisberger has always loved seeing the world through a lens. School reinforced that habit, sharpened her eye. What particularly prompted her to take roll after roll from her window seat was an utterly lovely April day dawning in New York.
"It was very early morning, and I just remember it being really beautiful, watching the sun rise and taking photographs," Weisberger recalls. "I had no idea I took that photo. It was on the negative."
That photo — developed at a drugstore or photo lab — was a horizon shot, layers of blue sky streaked with a barely perceptible reddish haze and oceans of roiling clouds that submerged all of New York except for the twin towers. That one heartbreakingly glorious moment stood out, between a picture just of clouds and another of the entire city. Then, she stowed the prints away.
Collapsing images
She would pull them out five months later. Weisberger, who spent the summer waitressing in Boston, was beginning her sophomore year at NYU, in the Department of Photography and Imaging. "I was getting ready for school. It was maybe my second day of class," she recalls. Her dormitory was located southwest in the Village, close to the World Trade Center. When she and her boyfriend at the time, Ryan, walked outside, they looked up and right through a hole burning in one of the towers.
"We kept walking and didn't know what to make of it," she says. They continued on, stopping on Sixth Avenue for orange juice and a bagel. There, they saw the second plane hit. "Crowds of people just stopped in their tracks. And at that moment, I realized that it was terrorists." Shell-shocked, she and her boyfriend -- who was booked on a flight later that day -- said goodbye, and she headed to her first day of dance class. For two surreal hours, the teacher taught the fully attended class as if nothing had happened. As if two hijacked Boeing 767s hadn't crashed into one of New York's greatest landmarks just blocks away. At the end of class, a woman came in, announcing, "'The towers have fallen. I don't know if you know what happened.'"

Katie Weisberger

Weisberger didn't have her camera equipment on her, not for dance class, but she didn't take photos that day, nor much at all after 9/11. There were too many others documenting the devastation, capturing bits and pieces of the unfathomable.
Instead, she remembered her photo, in storage under the bed. She knew people would want to see it, and when the storefront exhibit "Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photographs," sought out contributors, she turned in her print. Hers became No. 1621 in an exhibit that would eventually comprise 5,690 images and travel the world. In the 2008 book "After Photography," NYU photography teacher and author Fred Ritchin noted:

Interestingly, the best-selling image from the exhibition (the proceeds from the photos, which were selected by interested buyers without at first knowing who made the image, went to charity) was by Katie Day Weisberger, a student who had, a few months before the attacks, photographed the World Trade Center towers emerging from the clouds while seated in a passing airplane.