Gilles reached the World Trade Center just before the second tower collapsed. The firemen in the photograph don’t know what’s hit them. The one holding an unlit flashlight, the one with the useless gurney—they stand in their desert of ruin, frozen before the obliteration of their expectations, and ours. There it is: ashes to ashes, dust to dust, no metaphors. And yet, as we sensed in the haze of that moment and see too clearly today, it’s not a picture of an ending but, more truly, of a condition without end.
