I remember seeing this haunting image from September 11, 2001, showing a young boy being photographed. He seems oblivious to the initial strike on the World Trade Center behind him, and even the pedestrians are nonchalantly walking along as the terrorist attack unfolds blocks away. The picture seems to rob the child of his innocence and metaphorically tarnishes the naïveté of all of us in that pivotal moment.
But is the picture a fake? There are a few dramatic 9/11 photographs still circulating about today, only to later be debunked as hoaxes. And the picture of the boy has inspired just as many doubters as it has believers, bringing up so many questions. Where was this picture taken? When was it taken? Was it really snapped at the precise moment the first plane hit the North Tower? Who is the child? Who first uploaded the picture to the Internet? How did it go viral?
Researching this question, and particularly this photograph, took me on a journey during which I vacillated between skepticism and belief. At times, I was convinced it was fake, only to unveil evidence of its validity moments later. And then more doubt would be cast causing me to revert to skepticism. Through it all, I was determined to responsibly present the truth to my readers on Quora. And after exhaustive research, I finally came to a conclusion about this photograph.
Where was the photograph taken?
I know Manhattan quite well. Whether it was faked or not, I immediately knew the angle of the former World Trade Center in this photograph was unquestionably captured by a camera pointing south from Hudson River Park. The boy is (allegedly) standing along the Hudson River on the west side of Lower Manhattan.
(The modern location of the photo in 2023)
I am confident that the GPS coordinates of that photograph are 40.7243464, -74.0119227, in the Tribeca neighborhood (as seen above). The fence is different now, and the trees planted more than a decade after 9/11 have grown tall. But it’s the right spot.
From this position, the North Tower stood in front with its characteristic antenna, the building obstructing most of the South Tower with its base 4,018 feet (1,225 m) away. The photo first started gaining attention after being posted to the Reddit community titled r/pics on March 5, 2018. The user who uploaded the shot insinuated that the child and passersby were so calm because they didn’t realize the first airliner impact had just occurred. The World Trade Center was 17 blocks behind them. One debate that immediately arose on Reddit was whether the child was being photographed before the sound of the impact reached them, having had the luck of taking a picture at that precise moment. Or had the adult already heard the impact, knew what was happening, and took the picture purposefully? We can easily solve that mystery.
The location of the child would be a minimum diagonal distance of 4,181 feet (1,274 m) from the impact of American Airlines Flight 11 as it struck the North Tower with terrorist ringleader Mohammed Atta at the controls. Considering the speed of sound, it would take roughly 3.7 seconds for the sound of the crash to travel to the child’s ears. Conceivably, the picture could have been taken within that timespan by an adult who hadn’t yet heard the explosion nor noticed the plume of smoke arising from the North Tower. There’s just one problem.
When the plane struck the north face of the North Tower at 8:46:40 a.m. EDT, filmmaker Jules Naudet was standing at the corner of Lispenard and Church streets in Manhattan and filmed the impact. Shadowing New York firemen performing their daily routine for a pretty humdrum documentary, he instead captured the video of a lifetime. Naudet was standing 3,765 feet from the base of the North Tower and about half a mile southeast of the little boy in Hudson River Park. In the still frame from his video (pictured above), the smoke hadn’t risen high enough to match the picture of the boy until nine seconds after impact. So the boy’s photographer would have heard the explosion at least 5.3 seconds before snapping the photo and was certainly not oblivious while taking the picture. The premise of the Reddit post is completely wrong.
But there’s more evidence. A large ball of fire was still visible in Naudet’s film at that moment and for a number of seconds after, but that isn’t visible in the picture of the boy. By the time the fire had diminished, there was a considerable amount of smoke pouring out of the North Tower. Based on both audio calculations and visual clues, the photograph was certainly not taken anywhere near the time of impact. Does this prove a hoax or just faulty assumptions from the user who uploaded it to Reddit? We’ll find out.
Who was the boy and the photographer?
(Austin Sansone in 2019 as a soccer player for Bates College)
It turns out the boy was four-year-old Austin Sansone. His mother Susan Lyall was the photographer. They both lived in Tribeca not far from the World Trade Center, and even closer to the park where the photo was taken. It was Austin’s first day of Pre-Kindergarten and students weren’t reporting to school until 11:00 a.m., so he was at home watching cartoons. They were unaware of the first impact. As the second plane hit the South Tower at 9:03:02 a.m. EDT, static actually scrambled the reception on the television. The phone was soon ringing. It was Susan’s husband was calling to tell her two planes had struck the World Trade Center. She grabbed her camera and took Austin to the park because she knew this was going to be a huge news story.
How did the picture get uploaded to the Internet?
Back in 2001, only 45% of Americans owned a cell phone. But the first phone with a built-in camera wouldn’t even be available until 2002. Hence, there aren’t a plethora of videos taken on 9/11. While we were on the cusp of new technology in 2001, we were still taking pictures the old-fashioned way. The photograph was definitely taken by a film camera, a physically developed picture kept by the family. When 9th grader Austin Sansone decided to upload the photograph to Facebook in 2012, it obviously wasn’t in a digital format. So he took a picture of the old photograph using his cell phone and posted the picture.
With few Facebook followers, the picture received very little attention. In 2014, as a junior in high school, Austin uploaded the photo to the relatively new platform Instagram. It still didn’t go viral. In fact, to this day, Austin only has roughly 1,200 followers on Instagram.
The picture goes viral
In 2015, the photo was downloaded from either Austin’s Instagram or Facebook and reposted to the site formerly known as Twitter. A Reddit user with the handle rotub then downloaded it from Twitter and reposted it under the subreddit r/pics the evening of May 28, 2015, as seen below.
Some media sources state the picture wasn’t posted to Reddit until 2018, but this clearly isn’t true. Austin was told by a friend that the photo was circulating on Reddit with many claiming it was a hoax. So Austin, who had never heard of Reddit, made an account the following morning and insisted on the legitimacy of the picture. As he defended the photograph, some doubted he was the boy in the photograph simply because his Reddit account was only 14 minutes old. But the brevity of his Reddit presence clearly had an explanation since he made it with the sole intent of replying to the controversy. Unsurprisingly, he hasn’t posted on Reddit since that time.
On March 5, 2018, the photo really started gaining traction when an Australian Reddit user Gar1986 reposted the picture in the subreddit r/pics (as seen below) where, in grammatically incorrect English, they suggested that the boy and bystanders were oblivious to the developing situation behind them because it had just happened.
And this inaccurate title by a user halfway around the world who didn’t study the photo very closely fueled mass confusion and made the story seem more like deception than reality. With such a post, gullible people believe everything they read, while conspiracy theorists immediately refute it by twisting the evidence in their favor. I prefer to play the middle, relying on intellect and research to make an informed, rational decision. And it turns out that almost everybody was wrong including the naïve, the naysayers, and obviously Gar1986.
The doubters
Doubters noticed that the sun appeared at the top of the photograph, while the shadows of little Austin and all of the pedestrians were cast to the right. Based on the location of the sun, wouldn’t the shadows be smaller and pointing toward the camera? Unfortunately, those cynics were so excited to challenge the photograph that they ignored basic science. Austin’s mother Susan was pointing the camera south, and the sun at that time of the morning would have been rising in the east to the left of the picture. In that moment, I realized that Austin’s shadow on the fence was accurate, as well as the shadows of the bystanders.
But what about the appearance of the sun high in the sky as if it were noon? I had trouble with that too, until I realized what it was. Because Austin took a picture of the original photograph and uploaded it to the Internet, it was probably a camera flash and not the sun at all. In fact, Austin and his mother were interviewed in 2019, and it turns out the ball of light was the reflection of a desk lamp on the original photograph. The original is featured at the top of my post with no lamp reflection.
Others argued that the quality was so poor that the picture was taken in the ’80s and photoshopped to look like 9/11. I noticed that too. Soon Reddit users argued their theories about cheap cameras, low-quality film, and a picture developed years ago that degraded with time. But again, the loss in quality was due to Austin taking a picture of a picture with no way to post the original. So now things are seeming like less of a hoax and more like a real photo.
The misinformed
Meanwhile, gullible readers and especially Gar1986 failed to realize that the South Tower behind the North Tower in the photograph was already smoldering. The picture must have been taken after the South Tower was struck at 9:03:02 a.m. EDT. That explains the angle of the sun and the reason there isn’t visible fire as I pointed out earlier. Indeed, when Austin and his mother Susan were interviewed in 2019, they recalled that Susan’s husband had just called with the news of a plane hitting the second building. So she grabbed her camera and raced to the Hudson River a few blocks away to see it for herself. She couldn’t leave her four-year-old behind, so she took Austin with her. And that’s when she captured the image.
The picture wasn’t taken seconds after impact as Gar1986 suggested. It was an intentional effort to capture this historic moment, albeit morbid, taken between 9:00 and 10:00 a.m. along the West Side Highway. Susan even kept the roll of prints with the date of development marked as September 26, 2001. The story was legitimate.
And finally, the pedestrians
The only anomaly left to explain is the indifference of the people walking by the child. But 18 years later, Susan still remembered people, as odd as it was, calmly walking by. We have to understand that this is some 17 blocks north of the situation and far from the chaos. It’s also possible some of them may have evacuated much earlier and had not realized the second building had been hit. There was a lot of confusion in those moments. Looking closely, one man is actually looking back at the towers, so there is certainly recognition of the events. People were undoubtedly turning around at alternate moments not captured on film.
(There are other pictures of seemingly indifferent pedestrians who were in reality anything but disinterested)
Most importantly, I remember the shock of that moment vividly. We were all grappling with the realization that another plane had been flown into the World Trade Center and that we were under attack on American soil. But we never dreamed the towers would collapse and still figured (hoped) many would survive. I had just stood inside the towers a month earlier. Far away in Tennessee watching the live feed on my classroom television as a teacher, it was eerie picturing myself in the lobby so recently while watching this surreal scene of burning towers. Imagine the shock of those who had been there just minutes earlier! None of us can be blamed for our reaction, including those allegedly nonchalant pedestrians, before the buildings started to collapse at 9:59 a.m. and we all grasped how macabre this incident was going to be. The third plane hadn’t even hit the Pentagon until 9:37 a.m. EDT, and we all dealt with the early developing stages of this event in different ways.
One final note about another photograph
Now that we’ve established the picture is real, it’s interesting to note that Austin took another picture on September 11, 2011, on the 10-year anniversary of 9/11 at roughly the same location along the Hudson River. He hadn’t even uploaded the original 2001 picture to Facebook yet, a photo simply taken of a 14-year-old Austin Sansone for personal reasons.
On the other hand …
… Isabel Daser was eight months pregnant and had her picture taken in Manhattan dozens of blocks from the World Trade Center. In this case, she actually didn’t realize a terrorist attack was unfolding, nor did the photographer. So there are proven instances of this happening.
And perhaps the saddest photo to me …
… shows the juxtaposition of an innocent baby on a rooftop in Brooklyn and the evil perpetuated by terrorists across the East River, human beings who were once young and innocent themselves.
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