R ecently, I texted William Biggart Jr. and asked if he was up for talking about his father, Bill Biggart, the only photographer killed when the Towers fell on 9/11.
He immediately sent me a photo of a tattoo that covers his entire back. It depicts the Archangel Michael rising above the Old City of Jerusalem, his enormous wings spread over a city that is burning and smoldering. In Memoria Ut William G. Biggart is written across his son’s shoulder blades.
The tattoo has been arduous work for William, with setbacks and botched work taking up much of the past decade. With the 25th anniversary of 9/11 approaching, William made a final push to repair and enlarge it. (A recent session lasted seven-and-a-half hours before the pain forced him to stop.)
We talked two days later, and he explained to me what it all meant. William tells me Saint Michael is the angel that protects soldiers, police officers, and firefighters. He carries the fallen from the battlefield to heaven. Jerusalem was a link to his father’s work. Biggart had photographed the First Intifada, from street protests to refugee camps inside Israel, siding with people he believed had been screwed over by the powerful.
“For him, it was always about injustice,” says William, sitting in his home office in Seattle. Mounted on the wall behind his desk are framed photos his dad took covering the Intifada: wide-eyed young boys throwing rocks and another one of an old Palestinian man walking by a teenage IDF soldier, rifle at the ready. “Putting the images together, it all just kind of made sense.”
In addition to William, I talk with his younger brother Peter and Wendy Doremus, Biggart’s widow. (Kate, Biggart’s daughter and middle child, declined to be interviewed.) They remember the same man from different perspectives, like three different photos taken of the same monument.
William, born in 1969, knew Biggart for 32 years: as a young single father who took him along to bars when he had a date, smoking and playing pool with him deep into the night in their Manhattan loft. Peter had just turned 14 when he lost his dad. He remembers an ardent Yankees fan who refused to move his seat when the team was rallying and the comically Bligh-like captain of the family sailboat. And Doremus? She knew him as her intense, always interesting, endlessly restless partner.
Editor’s picks
The 250 Greatest Albums of the 21st Century So Far
The 100 Best TV Episodes of All Time
The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
100 Best Movies of the 21st Century
That was all before that perfect September morning. So beautiful, Biggart might have taken his sailboat out from Chelsea Piers. Then, Biggart and Doremus heard from a cabbie passing by about an explosion down by the World Trade Center. (He’d covered the 1993 Trade Center bombing.) He left his wife and their Flatiron loft carrying three cameras. In trademark Bill Biggart style, he sprinted toward danger.
Only a part of him made it back.
BILL BIGGART’S CAMERAS CAME BACK back to Wendy Doremus in two black trash bags three weeks after her husband disappeared beneath the North Tower. She collected his gear at a West Side pier and carried it to Biggart’s studio on Weehawken Street.
Bill Biggart in Lucca, Italy in 2000 © Wendy Doremus The next day, photographer friends Chip East and Tom McKitterick helped her unpack two Canon EOS-1cameras and a new Canon D30 digital camera. The equipment was mutilated and ash-covered, and the digital camera’s lens was sheared off. East extracted its memory card. His computer initially failed to read it. He rebooted, and three folders appeared. Eventually, he developed the film from the other two cameras.
Related Content
Watching the Planes Take Off From Logan Airport
Trump’s Bizarre History With 9/11
How to Watch Tonight's ABC Special ‘9/11: United We Stand — 25 Years Later’ Online for Free
Jon Stewart, Pete Davidson Lead 9/11 Benefit at Madison Square Garden
Biggart’s photographs capture the terror of Lower Manhattan on Sept. 11. He documented engines racing downtown, the South Tower collapsing, survivors emerging powdered with dust. The pictures also trace Biggart moving toward the remaining tower.
He managed to call Doremus amid the madness. He told her to meet him at his studio in 20 minutes and not to worry.
“I’m safe, I’m with the firemen.”
Doremus pauses as she tells me the story of Biggart’s final hours. “I don’t tell this to a lot of people, but when he said, ‘I’m safe. I’m with the firemen,’ I go to myself, ‘What the hell? Don’t do me any favors. You’re not safe.’”
Biggart’s final photo is time-stamped 10:28:24 a.m., and depicts the remains of the South Tower and the adjoining wrecked Marriott beneath the still-standing North Tower. Moments later, it fell.
Perhaps stupidly, I asked each of his family members if they had a cherished image from Biggart’s 9/11 photos. They all give a variation on Doremus’ answer, which is that they cherish his other photos, from Gaza clashes, Northern Ireland IRA funerals, and NYC mayhem, but not the 9/11 shots.
“No, I still don’t really look at them,” Doremus says. “It’s just too painful.”
Sept. 11 made Biggart posthumously famous, but the final pictures are not what define him. For his family, 9/11 was not the beginning of Bill Biggart. It explained everything that had come before.
“I DON’T HAVE FRIENDS,” BIGGART used to joke. “I only have brothers and sisters.”
He wasn’t wrong. Biggart was born in Berlin in 1947, where his father served in the military police, two years after being wounded at the Battle of the Bulge. He was the second of 12 children in an Irish Catholic family that eventually settled on Long Island. Peter remembers that his father always ate with alarming speed. That was his childhood. As a kid, three chickens might be divided among the children; hesitation meant going hungry.
Trauma and loss were his constant companions. When Biggart was five, the family house caught fire. He and his older brother escaped through an upstairs window, but two younger brothers died. He carried that loss inside him his entire life. Biggart rarely discussed it, though the experience announced itself whenever his children approached fireworks or open flames.
“He was always very anal retentive with any open flames and hated fucking fireworks and sparklers,” Peter remembers. “It would kind of trigger him.”
Several brothers of Biggart followed their father into the military. Not Biggart. He became a pacifist and clashed with his father over Vietnam. He quit high school and started to fool around with cameras in his teens. He fled to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury. Biggart developed an allegiance to the people he believed America mistreated.
“He had that Irish Catholic thing — what is it? — the underdog, the oppressed, the injustice of things,” Doremus says.
There were other burdens. Biggart married young and moved back to New York City. William was born in 1969. A few years later, Biggart’s wife went out for cigarettes and never came back. He found himself a single dad in his early twenties. Biggart had recently started taking photos of down-and-out characters in New York City with an old camera. Those stark early images scored him apprenticeships with prominent photographer Howell Conant and commercial photographer Lee Michaels.
And he tried his best to raise his son. He treated his boy less like a child than an undersized accomplice. William received keys at six because keys represented responsibility and were not to be lost. William remembers being placed on a stool at Manhattan bars, while his father socialized and flirted. “He brought me in like a trained chimp,” William says with a laugh. “He found me unbelievably useful for dating.”
Work was everything. William remembers Biggart working for 20 hours straight. Biggart brought the boy into his poorly ventilated darkroom for company and chain-smoked while William grew dizzy.
“All I remember my father doing was working,” William says.
Yet he also remembers a father who could behave like a little boy: playing pool with him into the wee hours.
“He did the best he could.”
Biggart never let his son win at pool, cards, or chess. “If I let you win, you’re never going to learn,” he said. Affection and severity were inseparable. Biggart demanded independence, hated being contradicted in public, and believed in rough discipline. According to William, the only way his dad could uncoil his nerves was with a joint.
Wendy Doremus with Bill Jr., Peter, and Kate © Bill Biggart / Estate of Bill Biggart By the early Seventies, Biggart had a flourishing commercial photography career, but sometimes snuck away on passion projects. He left his son in 1973 with his mother and traveled to Wounded Knee, South Dakota, where a standoff between the FBI and tribal members sparked violence.
“I do not know how he would have survived without it.”
He broke through the FBI’s lines only to be detained by protesters who suspected he was a federal agent. (He talked his way out but lost much of his film.) It established a pattern that lasted his entire life: If Biggart thought something mattered, danger was somebody else’s problem.
Wendy Doremus first encountered Biggart through a cousin in the late 1960s. They reconnected years later. She was a New York girl who had gone to Europe; He was the slightly older photographer working in a studio. She remembered a physical intensity that never left his lean six-foot frame.
“He vibrated a little bit,” Doremus says. “He was the kind of guy that would walk into a room and there was an immediate reaction from people. You either loved him or you hated him.”
Doremus moved into the boys’ club where Biggart and eight-year-old William lived. Her arrival gave Biggart the freedom to travel. She urged him to go to Brazil, where he photographed street life, Carnival, and children in Rio de Janeiro. He’d never been overseas, and the trip was delayed as he had to track down his birth certificate so he could get his first passport.
One of Biggart’s photographs from 1980s Ireland © Bill Biggart / Estate of Bill Biggart In 1979, the couple bought space in a former pen factory near 18th Street and Broadway. They renovated the commercial loft into a home and rented out the rest. That investment helped provide the stability that allowed Biggart to leave commercial photography for spot news photography. He obtained a New York City press card and closed the studio business.
He monitored a police scanner and chose his own stories. They were not cheery ones. He photographed Howard Beach, the police killing of Eleanor Bumpurs, the death and funeral of Yusuf Hawkins, and protests over Abner Louima. (One of the things that drew me to Biggart’s story was remembering that I had seen his stark photos for The Village Voice when I was a teenager.)
In between, he shot gay-pride marches, squatters, punks, and the daily theater of New York City. His picture of “Subway Vigilante” Bernhard Goetz came through pure NYC collision: Biggart encountered Goetz on a train and began shooting. Goetz objected, but Biggart reasoned that once you’ve shot kids on a subway — Goetz claimed self-defense — you’ve lost your right to privacy.
He returned repeatedly to danger zones, including Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza during and after the First Intifada, photographing refugee camps, grieving families, soldiers, and settlers. In Northern Ireland, he covered the Troubles with breathtaking access: grieving mothers at IRA funerals and Catholic neighborhoods in Belfast under siege. In November 1989, fresh from a root canal, he flew to Berlin in time to photograph the fall of the Wall.
At home, the intense witness to injustice was, well, intense. Kate was born in 1984 and Peter in 1987. The family lived in the Flatiron loft, where Biggart maintained a darkroom and a rooftop garden. When he wasn’t traveling for work, he regarded Manhattan as his everything. Brooklyn was intergalactic travel for him when he wasn’t on assignment.
“Why would I go to China?” Peter remembers him asking. “I can go to Chinatown. Why would I go to India? I can go to East Fourth Street.”
THE FAMILY’S ESCAPE WAS SAILING, often heading out to Shelter Island for summer vacations. Still, Bill Biggart could convert recreation into crisis. William was handling the boat alone by 12 because Biggart insisted he know how to bring it home if something happened to him.
“He was insane, he was absolutely nuts,” Peter says with a laugh. “He was screaming and yelling, ‘Tie the lines.’ And then you’d tie all the lines, and then you’d catch the wind, and he’d be like, ‘Oh, this is great! How peaceful is this?’ And everyone would be, ‘What the fuck, man? It’s not peaceful.’”
In 1994, Biggart photographed the Shati Refugee Camp in Gaza. © Bill Biggart / Estate of Bill Biggart Biggart and Peter bonded over love of the Yankees. They muted televised playoff games and listened to the radio call, accepting the delay for the familiar voices. If the Yankees got a hit while he was standing, Biggart remained upright until the inning ended.
Biggart’s velocity faltered toward the end. He lost two brothers and his mom in the last two years of his life. William remembers taking his dad out for sushi on his birthday around then, shortly after Biggart began taking antidepressants.
“He felt sick, couldn’t eat, and walked away,” William says.
Still, there were more good days than bad. Sept. 11, 2001, began as one of them. It was calm and beautiful, a day Biggart might take the boat out for some late-summer serenity. Instead, Biggart and Doremus took their two dogs for a walk. That’s when they saw smoke. A taxi driver shouted that a plane had hit the World Trade Center.
They returned to the loft. Biggart collected two film cameras, his digital D30 — a new technology he was just learning — several rolls of film and his press credentials. To Doremus, this was not the Middle East or Belfast. It was just another New York story.
“It never even passed my mind that this would be something dangerous,” Doremus says. “This is his beat.”
Biggart moved downtown on foot, photographing as he went. His eldest son was already there. William worked across West Street on the eighth floor of One World Financial Center. He had arrived at 6:30 a.m. and was in a morning meeting when the first plane hit. Outside, he looked up at the North Tower and remembers thinking, “That’s not a fucking Cessna.”
William saw people jumping from the tower. He told those around him not to look up. Then he heard a whoosh and saw the second airplane. He ran through the crowd toward Gateway Plaza. Inside a glass passageway, people piled up at a chokepoint. William directed people around the logjam of humanity. They began walking north.
One thought kept returning to William: “God, I hope my father’s sailing today.” But he understood that Biggart would have seen the smoke from almost anywhere in Manhattan.
“I knew,” William says. “He’s fucking coming down.”
After the second plane struck, Doremus knew the crashes were an attack. Cell service was failing, but she kept dialing because Biggart, walking beneath the buildings, might not understand the larger event. Eventually he answered.
“Bill, this is a terrorist attack,” she told him. “It’s not just a plane crash.”
He said he would meet her in 20 minutes at his West Street studio.
By then, Biggart had photographed the towers from nearly underneath them. At 9:59 a.m., the South Tower collapsed. William had reached roughly Canal Street when he turned and watched it fall. His father, much closer to the tower, disappeared into the cloud but survived. Biggart photographed people coughing and wiping debris from their eyes, firefighters and police officers staring upward, papers floating over streets that had become nearly unrecognizable. Then, while most people fled, he resumed moving toward the complex.
Biggart’s final pictures depict his path toward the pedestrian bridges and entrances beneath the World Financial Center. Years later, says William, a surviving police officer described encountering Biggart near the revolving doors below the building. According to the account William remembers, Biggart was looking up to take a photograph; the officer followed his gaze, saw the North Tower beginning to collapse, and yelled for them to run. The officer made it through a door. Biggart did not. When William later met him at a gathering connected to the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, the officer told him, “If it wasn’t for your father, I wouldn’t be alive today.”
Peter learned through rumors at school that the Pentagon had been hit and maybe the White House, too. Students were told to wait for their parents. William found a landline, reassured his then-wife, changed out of his ruined shoes, retrieved the family Volvo, and collected Peter.
With the usual routes sealed, William drove over a curb and through Central Park. Peter laughed as they crossed the grass. “This is so cool,” the kid thought. William did not tell him what he feared about their dad.
Back at the loft, CNN replayed the day. Their mother told the kids that their father was photographing and would return. Family friends arrived. The Old Town Bar, their second living room on 18th Street, sent over food. Peter remembers chicken wings, the foul Lower Manhattan air, and buying an industrial respirator at a hardware store. Years later, putting on the same kind of mask in architecture school would return him to those days.
William tried to sound hopeful for his brother and sister, but by that evening he knew better. There had been almost no stream of injured survivors arriving at the hospitals. And he understood how his father worked. Biggart did not stand back with a long lens.
“He was a 35-millimeter close-up, focus-on-the-eyelashes photographer,” William says. “For that you’ve got to be within five feet.”
At 10:28:24 a.m. on Sept. 11, Biggart took this photograph of the destruction. © Bill Biggart / Estate of Bill Biggart William knew that once Biggart reached Ground Zero, he would have moved as close as the police and firefighters allowed, then moved closer. That afternoon, Doremus went to Biggart’s studio, but her husband wasn’t there. Walking north with her brother, she passed St. Vincent’s Hospital. Ambulances waited outside, but there were no patients arriving. Seventh Avenue was so quiet they walked up the middle of it.
At first, she did not panic. It was only when the phone didn’t ring that she lost hope. Biggart loved the telephone. Wherever he was in the world, he called home. That day, the phone never rang.
Still, Doremus copied one of his old press passes and posted it at Bellevue and other hospitals. The family checked makeshift medical stations. Peter entertained the possibilities families invent when the obvious is unendurable: His father was injured and unconscious in some hospital.
But then came Sept. 15. Four days after the attacks, searchers recovered Biggart’s body near several firefighters. The family gathered on the couches in the loft. Doremus sat with Peter, Kate, and William. “They found your father,” Peter remembers her saying. “He’s passed.”
Peter was 14, entering high school without his dad. In the years that followed, close ties to their extended family faded, something Biggart never would have allowed.
“He was just the center,” Peter says. “He was the gravity that held everything together.”
Rites of passage became occasions for further grief. A decade later, Peter graduated from the University of Colorado and watched other fathers play beer pong with their graduating sons. Peter thought, “My fucking dad would have loved this.”
William lost somebody different. By 32, he and Biggart spoke several times a day, argued, worked together, and played marathon sessions of eight ball. William had his own place but came over to the loft almost daily. He knew a flawed, brave man, someone so human that the loss seemed unbearable.
After 9/11, friends asked William what made his father break his promise to Doremus to meet her at his studio and, instead, keep moving deeper into hell. Had Biggart gone home, William says, “he would have been fucking insufferable” about the pictures he missed.
William resists mythologizing his father. “Photographers aren’t heroes,” William says. “They capture people doing heroic things.”
For years, Peter avoided the Sept. 11 pictures and rarely told people how his father died. In college, he finally showed his father’s website to a friend studying film. The friend’s astonishment pushed him to look again. He discovered not just the towers but the work his father had made before Peter was old enough to understand it — punks forced from Lower East Side squats, street portraits from Brazil, the endless cycle of protest and police violence.
Today, Peter is an architect in Los Angeles. After the 2025 Altadena fire, he began designing a replacement home for a family whose property had burned. He resists linking his father’s childhood fire, Sept. 11, and his own work, but allows that something he can’t quite define may be at work.
The three surviving family members I talked with approach Biggart’s final photos in a similar way. Doremus and Peter can revisit the earlier work with pleasure but rarely summon the strength to study Sept. 11. Asked what he felt when he learned that the memory card had survived, William says, “I didn’t care.”
He does not mean the pictures are unimportant. He means that the public artifacts could not compensate for his private loss. Parents die, he says, but the public commemoration of 9/11 forces his family to experience his dad’s death again, year after year.
Biggart’s family has never sold his Sept. 11 photographs. William tells me that if someone recognizes a relative in a frame, the estate will provide a print with restrictions against resale. (The photos are all up on the site https://www.billbiggart.com/september-11th.)
Wendy Doremus still lives in the family loft. She lent Biggart’s equipment to the Newseum in Washington, D.C. When it closed, the cameras were returned to her, and she is still looking for a permanent home for them. Peter tells me Biggart has been memorialized on TikTok by users telling his story to a generation born after his death. And for the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the Imperial War Museum in London is presenting Biggart’s Sept. 11 pictures beside those of Associated Press photographer Suzanne Plunkett. It is the first exhibition of Biggart’s final work outside of the United States.
Trending Stories
Donald Trump Took a Wrecking Ball to the White House. The Next President Must Do the Same
Jimmy Kimmel Says James Talarico Interview Won’t Air on TV After Trump’s FCC Threatened His Show
Fundraiser for Lindsay Clancy's Parents Raises Over $1.1 Million After Mistrial
CDs Are Back, and We Think We Know Why
In Seattle, William resides in a Pioneer Square loft that reminds him of downtown New York in the 1970s. Meanwhile, the world keeps turning. Gaza and death are back on the front page. William says his father would not be shocked. “He wasn’t a romantic,” William says. “My father would not be surprised by human nature.”
William grimaces a bit as he talks, the pain from his last day under the needle still reverberating. On his back, Saint Michael is forever emerging from a burning Jerusalem.
