After 9/11 the director felt haunted by the twin towers attack. As his epic photographs of Ground Zero go on show for the atrocity’s anniversary, he remembers the horrors of that day – and considers its legacy
As a boy growing up in the rubble and ruins of postwar West Germany, Wim Wenders would often dream of falling towers. So at the age of 56, when he watched the twin towers of the World Trade Center blaze and then plummet into the streets of New York, the impact hit him hard. “It started to haunt me badly,” he says. “I mean, I saw everything live on TV like everybody else. All of mankind was badly shaken. But I kept dreaming of being stuck in collapsing towers. I wanted to somehow exorcise these things. And I figured if I could go to New York and see for myself, that would help.”
That was how Wenders came to be at Ground Zero in the aftermath of the attacks and took the five large-format photographs now showing at the Imperial War Museum in London as part of its 9/11: Twenty Years On exhibition. They are extraordinary works, capturing great horizontal and vertical swathes of this steel-and-concrete apocalypse, with cranes, diggers and firefighters standing out in heroically bright colours. Shattered pillars jut out from piles of warped girders in a hellish crucible of chaos and destruction.