"To my knowledge — and I challenge the reader to offer one example — no-one in the entire history of photography, since its invention in 1826 by another Frenchman, Nicéphore Niépce, has produced an image like the Naudet film of American Airlines Flight 11. No other world-shattering event, as sudden, as rapid and as totally unexpected to the people of New York as the arrival of that plane was — which is why, essentially, nobody else got it — has ever been recorded on film: least of all with only six seconds to spare, after a 90-degree camera pan and with the buildings that were both about to be hit over the next 20 minutes centered in the shot, and framed by the buildings on the sides of the street next door, like curtains framing the action on a theatrical stage. There had been nothing like it in the previous 175 years, and there has been nothing like it since. In the putative "Complete History of Documentary Photography," in the chapter entitled "Accidental Pictures of Moments that Changed the World," the only name mentioned would be Jules Naudet's: how many other photographers have a whole branch of the art all to themselves? The unique 9/11 event was the subject of an equally unique photographic achievement."