(CNN)Shortly after September 11, 2001, photographer Steve McCurry stored his processed film of the destruction in a filing cabinet at his Manhattan studio. He did not look at the images closely again for 10 years.
"I really didn"t want to relive that whole thing," McCurry says. "I couldn"t look at it. It was too painful."
The memories remain raw for many people. The passage of 15 years doesn"t make it easier.
The haunting and surreal images captured by members of the Magnum Photos collective on the day of the World Trade Center attacks may help explain why. The photographs of one of the most observed catastrophes in history were collected in the book "New York September 11."
McCurry, 66, had just returned from a trip to China. His photo equipment was still packed. His assistant"s mother called the studio to say the World Trade Center was burning. He grabbed his cameras and headed to the roof.
At 9:59 a.m., the south tower began to crumble. In 10 seconds, it was gone.
"That didn"t happen," McCurry remembers thinking. "This is like a dream."
A group of residents had gathered on the roof. A mother gently tended to her baby as a thick, dark plume of smoke enveloped lower Manhattan.
"From the perspective of being a photographer, it was an utterly serendipitous photograph," Webb says of his picture of a mother and child. "I came onto the roof and there were some people out there and practically the first picture I took was the series of that woman and baby."
He added, "Thinking about the picture afterwards, there is something sort of haunting about the notion that here"s this baby and this huge disaster behind and there"s some sense that, "Well, this is the world he is coming into.""
"A life-changing event"
McCurry recalls passing several police checkpoints as he made his way to where the towers once stood.
"I wasn"t going to be stopped," he remembers. "This was something I had to do ... I just felt like I had to do my part as a document, as a memory of what happened. It kind of felt like this was an attack on my neighborhood, in my home."
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He captured heartrending images of firefighters struggling to find survivors, of the sheer magnitude of the destruction not far from his home. "There was all this effort to look for people and survivors but it was just so futile," he said. "The whole thing just seemed so unreal."
Emotions among first responders were running high.
"Some of the firemen were really upset," McCurry said. "One wanted to come after us with a shovel."
McCurry calls 9/11 "a life-changing event."
"For a long time after I had kind of a vertigo," he says. "In my apartment -- I live on the 17th floor -- I felt like the building was going to fall. Your mind played tricks on you."
Peress said 9/11 propelled the nation into a tumultuous period from which it has yet to emerge.
"The beginning of the century was extremely chaotic and very, very intense and almost everybody was left disoriented in terms of what to think, what to do, what to feel," he says. "We really are in the Twilight Zone since then."
Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/08/us/new-york-9-11-magnum-photographers/index.html
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