January 20, 2007

A man approached me this week and told me, point-blank: “I photographed four of the 9/11 hijackers.” A bit of explanation...

I’m in Delray Beach, Florida, at FotoFusion, the annual conference for photographers and assorted picture-business experts (run by the Palm Beach Photographic Centre), to which up-and-comers migrate every winter to gather inspiration from current and former mandarins of the photo community.

The most stunning discovery during my time here has been meeting Art Nejame, who helps organize the conference with his wife, Fatima, and former Time magazine photo mayven Arnold Drapkin. Knowing that I was down at FotoFusion to speak about the photography in the aftermath of September 11, Art pulled me aside and told me his own 9/11 story, which he has kept quiet for 6 years.

Art, it so happens, runs the Pro Shop in downtown Delray, catering to professional and serious amateur photographers. Because his family hails from Lebanon’s Shouf mountains, he speaks fluent Arabic.

In the summer of 2001, he recalled, two men walked into his photo store and asked him to take their headshots, presumably for use on a passport, visa, I.D. card or driver’s license. One was Mohammed Atta, the chief coordinator of the 19 hijackers. The other, according to Art, was “a short Egyptian – I recognized his accent, a beautiful dialect, actually, and I [later] recognized him from the [F.B.I.’s and Interpol’s I.D.] pictures” that ran around the world. (Fifteen of the 19 hijackers lived for a time in south Florida, finalizing their upcoming attacks.)

Atta was pleased enough with Art’s pictures that he brought in two other young men and asked that their photos be taken as well. “They were both Saudis,” Art said. “I could tell because they have a more gutteral way of speaking. At one point I said, ‘So you speak Arabic?’ and they become very nervous.”

Art had no reason to be particularly suspicious. In 2001, Arabic-speaking men had their photographs taken every day in America without anyone raising an eyebrow. He merely found it odd that the men seemed agitated when realizing he could understand Arabic.

Art is going to send an e-mail describing his encounter in more detail, which I will post here very soon. (As I write in Watching the World Change, citing a New York Post article: among them, the 19 hijackers had 61 I.D. photos taken, for various purposes, including use on martyr posters and, later, al-Qaeda Web sites.)