‘Images were suddenly powerless’: how the arts responded to 9/11

On the 20th anniversary of the attack on New York's Twin Towers, we consider how artists, writers, film-makers and comedians have attempted to grasp that momentous day and its legacy

As the world clustered, transfixed, around television screens, watching and rewatching footage of a plane gliding into the top of New York's twin towers and a tiny, anonymous man plummeting to earth, another scene was unfolding on the ground, as panic-stricken families stumbled through the smoke and rubble to gather up their children from schools and kindergartens.

Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly stood four blocks away with their daughter, watching the second tower fall in excruciatingly slow motion". As art director of the New Yorker magazine, Mouly knew that she would have to come up with a rapid response. I felt that images were suddenly powerless to help us understand what had happened. The only appropriate solution seemed to be to publish no cover image at all - an all-black cover. Then Art suggested adding the outlines of the two towers, black on black. So from no cover came a perfect image, which conveyed something about the unbearable loss of life, the sudden absence in our skyline, the abrupt tear in the fabric of reality," she later recalled.