Teacher-Education Student's Sept. 11 Photo Included in Film

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A man talks on the phone trying to find out about his daughter, who was in a day care center in one of the towers.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – A photograph taken by Tracey Haynes, a University of Arkansas graduate student, is included in a documentary that will be shown Sept. 8 at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., as part of a daylong commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Haynes is in the Master of Arts in Teaching program doing her teaching internship in eighth-grade English at Woodland Junior High School in Fayetteville. She earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Missouri in journalism with an emphasis on photojournalism.

"It was my second visit to New York City," Haynes recalled. "I was moving there and I was in the north of the city, staying in a hostel until I could find an apartment. I saw the first tower get hit on a television news report. I took the train down to photograph. The train I was on was the last one to run before the city stopped service. As I came up out of the subway, both towers were on fire. The second one had been hit while I was in the subway."

Haynes shot two rolls of film and found a photography shop that was open so she bought a dozen more rolls. She took numerous photographs of people in the city that day and in the following days.

People flee from the Twin Towers following terrorist attack Sept. 11, 2001.

"People were running toward me and I was crouching down to take pictures," she said. "A photo I took of a cop yelling at people to get away was the first one I was able to make without people hitting my shoulders as they started running north, away from the falling tower."

The documentary to be shown Sept. 8 features her photo of a man on the phone trying to find out if his daughter was safe. The daughter was in a day care center in one of the towers. The woman next to him in the photo was a stranger trying to comfort and soothe him, Haynes said.

The Center for National Policy and the Voices of September 11th, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, are sponsoring the film festival and daylong summit.

Some of Haynes' pictures were part of the Here Is New York photo gallery in Soho that sold prints to raise money for the children of people killed in the twin towers. The exhibition was subtitled "A Democracy of Photographs" because anyone and everyone who has taken pictures relating to the tragedy was invited to submit their images to the gallery, where they were digitally scanned, printed and displayed on the walls alongside the work of top photojournalists and other professional photographers, according to the gallery's website.

"All the pictures were anonymous," Haynes said. "It gave us a sense of community. It was sort of a precursor to Facebook with people sharing images. People really needed this in order to process what happened."

Her photos are also included in a book published by the gallery.

On Sept. 8, Haynes will use some of her images in a lesson with the class at Woodland she is co-teaching with Jamie Highfill, her mentor teacher.

"English class is often about interpreting culture and text in general, about dissecting literature, film, music and photography," she said. "I'm excited to talk with the kids about the images to see what they think. The eighth-graders were just 3 years old when it happened."