If you were unfortunate enough to remain glued to the television set on September 11, and the days immediately following, the image of the second plane crashing into the World Trade Center, and the collapse of the towers, was burned into your brain.

There are two reasons that those images will always been with you:

The first reason is the most obvious - what was captured on the video was horrible beyond all imagining, and therefore it is unlikely you will ever be able to forget it;

The second reason is slightly less obvious - the video clip was replayed, over such a long period of time, that it became, in effect, a still image which you had time to study, think about, consider on many levels, and permanently absorb.

You would think that, in this video age, moving images would have far more impact than "old fashioned" still photography, what we have always called photojournalism. But the truth is that still images often have far more impact than moving images for the simple reason that we normally have far more time to look at them.

Critics and students of photography have often commented in the past several years upon the fact that, in this video age, it is getting harder and harder to satisfactorily capture in a still image what is going on in a moving scene. In his book, My War Gone By, I Miss It So, Anthony Loyd, a former British military officer who went to the Balkans and Chechnya as a journalist, writes this about the difficulty of taking still photographs of combat:

"The photographs I had taken that day were useless. Take away the sound, motion and atmosphere from a scene of fighting, transpose an image on to a two-dimensional surface, and you have to have something really special to communicate even a trace of the madness you have witnessed." Loyd then notes that having actually witnessed what he had photographed, he knew what reality lay behind his photos. "Friends there knew it. They were all wise enough to know what might lie behind a fuzzy shot of a soldier running. But people who had never been to war? Their understanding of combat was the Hollywood version."

However, Loyd writes, still photography can, when it is very very good, leave "all the other mediums of reportage so far behind as to make them almost irrelevant: a single punch to the consciousness that will not go away until you close your eyes or look at something else."

There are such strong images of the WTC disaster: they were taken by photojournalist James Nachtwey, perhaps the best living photographer of war and disaster.

If you are able to look at more images of the horror, the you should go to Time Magazine's "Shattered" Photoessay to see a collection of Nacthwey's photos.

This group of photographs, almost all of which are studies of the ruin or clean up, may well be with you longer than that recurring video clip:

• Look at the opening image, taken through a shattered window, and consider the enormity of the disaster;
• Consider the next, with the cloud of the explosion rolling up behind the cross on the church roof - and think about how many people would twist this horror into a religious conflict;
• Look at image No. 2, which says far more than the proverbial "thousand words" about the humanity of a single individual being overwhelmed by this catastrophe;
• Think about the line of firemen in image 7, who are voluntarily, as individuals, and together, trudging onto the debris, risking their lives with every step they take;
• In image No. 9 we see the disaster's impact on individuals, but we also see far more than that - look at the bottle of Evian water, so prominent on the right of the photo - does this photo say something about American affluence, and does that make you think about some of the underlying issues connected to this horror?
• In photo No. 10 - what does the firemen on right see? Do you really want to know what he is looking at? Does he?
• And finally, in photo 11, consider the juxtaposition of the poster and the crushed police car - what seemed so vitally important only moments before the planes struck the tower now seems virtually meaningless.

I have singled out these particular photos - all in the portfolio are truly memorable - because I cannot look at these without thinking long and hard about far more than what is in them. Each of these photos could be the basis for a book about the disaster. Each, has frozen a single moment in time, and in doing so has told us more than the multiple minutes captured on video ever will.

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