Twenty-five years ago today, on September 11, 2001, nearly 3,000 people were killed in terrorist attacks that changed countless families, the United States, and much of the world.

Any discussion of photographs, documents, artwork, or other objects lost that day needs to begin with that perspective. Buildings can be rebuilt. Archives can sometimes be reconstructed. Human lives cannot.

But one measure of a catastrophe is how far its destruction radiates. September 11 did not merely take lives and buildings. It destroyed businesses, personal possessions, works of art, historical records, museum collections, archives, and pieces of the cultural memory that had been entrusted to the World Trade Center because no one imagined that they were in danger there.

Among them was one particularly remarkable collection: roughly 40,000 original photographic negatives of John F. Kennedy and his family, taken by photographer Jacques Lowe.

The cruelest part of the story is not simply that the negatives were in the World Trade Center when it was attacked.

The JFK photo archive was there because Jacques Lowe thought it would be safe.

Jacques Lowe Had a Front-Row Seat to the Rise of John F. Kennedy

Jacques Lowe was born in Cologne, Germany, in 1930 and spent part of his childhood in Europe under the shadow of Nazi persecution. He came to the United States in 1949 and eventually found his way into professional photography, working under celebrated portrait photographer Arnold Newman before establishing a career of his own.

One of Lowe’s early assignments brought him into contact with Robert F. Kennedy, who was then attracting attention for his work investigating labor racketeering in the U.S. Senate. Lowe photographed Bobby Kennedy and his family, and the pictures eventually came to the attention of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.

The elder Kennedy liked what he saw and asked Lowe to photograph another one of his sons.

That son was Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy, who had begun giving serious thought to acquiring a slightly larger office.

Beginning in 1958, Lowe gained extraordinary access to John and Jacqueline Kennedy. He photographed the Kennedys frequently from 1958 through 1961 and served as the official photographer for Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign.

This was not simply a matter of standing behind the press corps and waiting for Kennedy to approach a microphone.

Lowe was allowed inside.

Lowe Photographed the Kennedys Before They Became “The Kennedys”

John F. Kennedy would become one of the most photographed political figures of the twentieth century. The Smithsonian American Art Museum has described his era as part of a golden age of American photojournalism, when politics, television, magazines, and photography were converging in ways that permanently changed how presidents presented themselves to the public.

The Kennedys were particularly good at it.

They understood that voters did not merely encounter a candidate through speeches and policy statements. They encountered him through pictures: holding his daughter, talking with his wife, reading in a hotel room, leaning over a desk, laughing with supporters, preparing for a speech, or staring out the window of an airplane between campaign stops.

Political consultants have spent the decades since developing increasingly elaborate theories to explain the Kennedy appeal.

Lowe was there before much of the mythology had hardened into history. His camera documented Kennedy fighting through the 1960 primaries, winning the Democratic nomination, campaigning against Richard Nixon, waiting for election returns, celebrating victory, and beginning his presidency.

He also photographed moments that did not look particularly presidential at all.

That was part of their value.

A famous Lowe photograph shows the extended Kennedy family gathered at Hyannis Port on November 9, 1960, the morning after the election. Lowe later remembered that nobody particularly wanted to stop and pose for a family portrait. He persuaded Joseph Kennedy to gather everyone anyway. The resulting photograph captured the family at the precise moment when John F. Kennedy ceased being merely a candidate and became the president-elect of the United States.

It is one example of why Lowe’s collection mattered. These were not simply photographs of history. In many cases, they were photographs taken while everyone in the room was still discovering that history had just happened.

Forty Thousand Negatives Created a Storage Problem

By the time Lowe finished his intensive work with the Kennedy family, he had accumulated roughly 40,000 negatives.

For anyone who has grown up with digital photography, it is easy to underestimate what that meant.

Today, a photograph can exist simultaneously on a phone, a computer, a cloud server, a backup drive, a social-media account, and in the inbox of six relatives who did not ask for it. Film photography was less forgiving.

The negative was the master.

A photographic print could be made from it, but the negative contained the original image information. It allowed different crops, enlargements, exposures, and prints to be created later. Lose a print and another could ordinarily be made from the negative. Lose the negative and the relationship worked considerably less well in reverse.

This was the photographic world explored in our article on why people rarely smiled in old photographs: photography once involved physical originals, chemical processes, and objects that needed to be protected rather than merely copied into another folder.

Lowe therefore had a serious question to answer.

Where do you put 40,000 historically irreplaceable negatives?

The World Trade Center Seemed Like a Very Safe Answer

Lowe placed the Kennedy negatives in a safe-deposit vault at a J.P. Morgan Chase bank branch in 5 World Trade Center.

Five World Trade Center was a nine-story office building at the northeast corner of the World Trade Center complex and was not part of the Twin Towers.

Putting the negatives there was not an obviously reckless decision. Quite the opposite.

A bank vault inside one of the world’s premier commercial complexes offered professional security and substantial protection against theft, ordinary fire, accidental damage, and most of the other hazards one could reasonably anticipate.

If someone had asked in the summer of 2001 for a safer place to store a priceless photographic archive, a secure bank vault at the World Trade Center would have sounded like a perfectly respectable answer.

That is what makes the story so haunting.

Lowe was not taking a chance with his photographs.

He was trying to make sure nothing happened to them.

Jacques Lowe Died Four Months Before September 11

Jacques Lowe died of cancer on May 12, 2001. He was 71 years old.

He never knew what happened to his archive.

Four months later, on the morning of September 11, hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower at 8:46 a.m. United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower shortly afterward. Both towers collapsed that morning.

The devastation spread throughout the World Trade Center complex. Falling debris severely damaged surrounding buildings and ignited fires in several of them. 5 World Trade Center suffered uncontrolled fires, complete burnout on a number of floors, and partial collapse across four floors.

The building remained standing, but much of what was inside it did not survive.

The Vault Could Not Save the JFK Photo Archive

In the weeks after the attacks, customers who had safe-deposit boxes at the Chase branch waited to learn what had happened to them.

The answer eventually came.

In December 2001, CBS News reported that Chase had concluded that the weight of the debris and subsequent fires had destroyed an estimated 1,000 safe-deposit boxes and their contents.

Among those contents were Lowe’s Kennedy negatives.

Nearly the entire original photographic archive was gone.

The loss was not merely financial, although contemporary estimates placed the negatives’ value in the millions of dollars. Their historical value was considerably harder to calculate.

Some images had been published. Others existed as prints. But the original negatives preserved the full photographic information captured through Lowe’s camera. Some images might someday have yielded details through improved photographic or digital techniques that Lowe himself could never have imagined.

There would now be no opportunity to find out.

Ten Negatives Survived for the Most Accidental of Reasons

Almost all of Lowe’s Kennedy negatives were destroyed.

Almost.

Ten original negatives survived because they were not in the vault on September 11.

The Sixth Floor Museum reports that Lowe had removed a few original Kennedy negatives from storage to make new prints for a special exhibition and had not yet returned them when the attacks occurred. The Newseum later reported that ten negatives were outside the vault on September 11 and therefore survived.

Ordinarily, failing to return something promptly is not considered a sophisticated archival strategy.

In this case, it preserved ten pieces of history.

The Contact Sheets Suddenly Became Priceless

Fortunately, the negatives were not the only record of Lowe’s work.

His prints and contact sheets had been stored elsewhere in New York and survived.

A contact sheet is essentially a photographer’s index. Strips of negatives are placed against photographic paper and exposed, producing pages filled with small positive images. The photographer can study them, decide which frames are worth enlarging, and mark the promising ones.

They were working documents, not substitutes for the original negatives.

After September 11, that distinction became considerably less important.

The contact sheets now contained the only surviving versions of many Lowe photographs.

Technology Helped Rebuild What the Fire Destroyed

In the years after the attacks, Lowe’s family and photographic specialists began the painstaking work of recovering his Kennedy archive from those surviving materials.

The Lowe Estate used digitally enhanced contact sheets to produce the 2003 book Remembering Jack: Intimate and Unseen Photographs of the Kennedys. The Sixth Floor Museum subsequently worked with the estate on an exhibition of Lowe’s photography.

A decade later, the Newseum undertook an even more ambitious restoration project for a major Kennedy exhibition. Technicians scanned surviving prints and contact sheets and spent more than 600 hours digitally removing scratches, dust, and other flaws. The exhibition, Creating Camelot: The Kennedy Photography of Jacques Lowe, featured more than 70 images, while the broader restoration project created a comprehensive digital archive of Lowe’s Kennedy photographs.

The process effectively reversed the normal photographic workflow.

Originally, Lowe had used negatives to create contact sheets so he could decide which images deserved finished prints.

Decades later, technicians used those contact sheets to reconstruct photographs after the negatives themselves had ceased to exist.

The index had become the archive.

The Kennedy Negatives Were Not the Only History Lost on September 11

The destruction of Lowe’s negatives was part of a much larger cultural loss that received relatively little attention amid the overwhelming human tragedy.

A Library of Congress account of cultural treasures lost on September 11 identified Lowe’s approximately 40,000 Kennedy negatives alongside other irreplaceable materials destroyed in the attacks.

They included photographs, original letters, and first editions associated with Helen Keller, as well as part of the Broadway Theatre Archive’s collection of approximately 35,000 photographs documenting the history of the American stage.

The loss of Keller material is particularly striking because physical documents are often the evidence historians need to move beyond simplified versions of famous lives. We recently encountered exactly that problem while examining how much of Helen Keller’s writing was really her own. Letters, drafts, photographs, and archival records are what allow later generations to ask better questions about people who have been flattened into legends.

Once those records disappear, some questions become permanently harder to answer.

The Strange Difference Between Losing an Object and Losing Its Information

Lowe’s archive illustrates a distinction that has become increasingly important in the digital age.

The original negatives were destroyed.

But many of the photographs were not.

A photograph that had been printed before 2001 could still be reproduced from the print. An image appearing on a contact sheet could be scanned and enlarged. Published photographs survived in books and magazines. Modern restoration software could recover more detail from those secondary sources than would once have been possible.

None of this brought the negatives back.

A restored scan from a tiny contact-sheet image cannot contain photographic information that was present only in the original negative. Cropped material cannot necessarily be recovered. Fine detail can be approximated, enhanced, or reconstructed, but not magically retrieved from something that no longer exists.

The images survived in varying degrees.

The archive did not.

Twenty-Five Years Later, Preservation Is Part of Remembrance

There is something particularly appropriate about remembering Jacques Lowe’s lost photographs on the 25th anniversary of September 11.

Photography preserves moments people cannot keep. Archives preserve the photographs. And, when both are threatened, later generations sometimes have to preserve the preservation.

The work continues.

Just days before this anniversary, the Library of Congress announced that it had placed nearly 500 full-length interviews with September 11 responders online, making a major collection of firsthand testimony remotely accessible for the first time. The interviews were recorded between 2010 and 2024 and preserve the experiences of people who responded to the attacks and lived with their consequences.

That is the other side of the Jacques Lowe story.

History is fragile, but it is not entirely helpless.

Lowe placed his Kennedy negatives in a bank vault because they were priceless. The small contact sheets kept somewhere else were merely practical tools—useful pages for deciding which photographs deserved more attention.

On September 11, 2001, that hierarchy was reversed.

The priceless originals were lost. The working copies survived. From them, patient archivists and technicians recovered a remarkable portion of what had disappeared.

Twenty-five years later, the loss of Jacques Lowe’s negatives remains a small story within an enormously larger tragedy. It does not belong in the same category as the lives lost that morning, and it should not be treated as though it does.

But it does tell us something important about memory.

We preserve photographs because moments disappear. We preserve documents because witnesses eventually do too. We build archives because memory, by itself, is unreliable and mortal.

And sometimes history survives because somebody, somewhere, kept a copy.

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