The first signs of trouble were the telephones that wouldn’t stop ringing.
On Tuesday morning, Sept. 11, 2001, then-George Washington University sophomore Brandon Perlman, BA ’04, slept in. He had been out late the night before, listening to his favorite musician PJ Harvey at the 9:30 Club. With no early classes, Perlman and his two roommates dozed in their dorm room at City Hall, a former hotel converted into a residence hall on Washington Circle. Outside, the September morning was bright and clear.
Inside, the phones started ringing.
First came Perlman’s landline. It stirred him from his sleep, but he rolled over in bed and tried to ignore it. Soon it rang again—followed by one of his roommate’s phones and then another’s.
Still drowsy, Perlman checked his answering machine. His dad had left a message asking if he was OK. When a roommate’s machine clicked on, Perlman heard a panicked call from his mother. Choking back tears, she said she couldn’t reach his father, who worked in the World Trade Center. “I don’t know what’s going on,” she sobbed.
Bewildered, Perlman switched on his TV—just in time to see an airplane fly into the Trade Center’s South Tower.
“All of a sudden, I was thrown into the moment,” he said. As sirens echoed outside his window, Perlman followed his instincts. He grabbed his camera and headed toward campus.
Across Foggy Bottom, a cloudless morning at the beginning of the academic year was rapidly becoming a national tragedy. In a world without smartphones or social media, with phone lines jammed and information scarce, GW students, faculty and staff searched desperately for news of loved ones, knocking on friends’ doors and hugging passersby in the streets.
Shock and Sorrow: In dining halls and residence halls, students watched news footage in disbelief.
With his Leica M6 and a single roll of black-and-white film, Perlman snapped photos across GW. Today, on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Perlman’s photographs tell the story of a campus engulfed in fear and disbelief: students huddled in front of television screens, crying in dining halls and staring into space—stunned, sad and shaken.
“The energy wasn’t frantic or panicked. It was more shock, confusion and concern,” recalled Perlman, now a fine arts photographer and marketing entrepreneur. “People were waking up to this new world—and still uncertain about what it would look like from now on.”
What the Camera Saw
An electronic media major and photography buff, Perlman tried to make sense of the unfolding crisis in the best way he knew how—through a camera lens.
He traces his love of photography to the camera his grandfather gave him for his bar mitzvah—a Rolleiflex he salvaged from postwar Germany as a Marine. At GW, he put that camera to work. He covered concerts and events for The Hatchet, shooting Kanye West at Spring Fling, No Doubt at the Smith Center and celebrities like Margaret Cho, Dave Chappelle and Jerry Seinfeld.
Photography, Perlman said, “is what I was put on this earth to do.”
That morning, email service was spotty. The university switchboard was overloaded. Many students learned that classes were canceled through messages taped to classroom doors. In the lobby of the recently opened School of Media and Public Affairs building, Perlman photographed students crowded around banks of bulky CRT televisions, watching endless footage of the towers collapsing in New York and the devastation at the Pentagon.
Rumors raced through Foggy Bottom. Word spread—falsely—of attacks on the White House and a bomb at the State Department. With bridges and Metro stations closed, students relied on one another for scraps of news and shoulders to cry on. “We were trying to take it all in together,” Perlman said. “We were a chosen family for that day.”
There were moments of relief, too. Eventually, Perlman learned that his roommate’s father had been away from the World Trade Center on an errand when the planes struck. He later walked home to New Jersey.
That evening, Perlman saw National Guard troops and military Humvees throughout Foggy Bottom while the GW community gathered for a candlelight vigil in Kogan Plaza. He even spotted PJ Harvey outside her stranded tour bus in Georgetown. “We hugged and talked about how we were always going to remember this moment,” he said.
Something Like Normal
Still, the campus soon eased back into a sense of normalcy. Classes resumed the very next day. Perlman didn’t know anyone whose family was directly affected by the attacks, and although some friends talked about changing majors to newly urgent fields like international affairs or journalism, none enlisted in the military.
“People continued to go about their business,” he said. “They went on with their lives.”
Perlman did, too. He married GW alumna Jennifer Wilder, BBA ’05. Today, as the founder and CEO of Social Studies, Inc., an influencer marketing agency in Beverly Hills, Perlman still considers himself “a visual storyteller,” he said. He’s worked in the photography departments of publications like DEPARTURES, InStyle and W Magazine. He often films luxury travel and lifestyle destinations, from the British countryside and French coastal resorts to ski lodges in Aspen and St. Moritz.
For years, Perlman saw his 9/11 photos as visual markers of his singular experience—“My own personal time capsule,” he said. But as he’s flipped through the pictures on each 9/11 anniversary—returning to the scenes of students grappling with the unthinkable—he began to understand his work as a record of a historical tragedy, one that he increasingly wants to share with others.
“Now I see these photos as part of a larger narrative,” he said, “not just my story, but, in a way, the story of the people who were at GW that day.”
In Photos: September 11, 2001
