Message Machine

“I made the drive from LA to NY with a friend in three days, meaning no sleep, basically in shifts. We had plans to continue cutting my first feature “Nobody Needs To Know” there, and I got dropped off at my folks place in lower Manhattan at night, September 10th, 2001. The personal story that unfolded the next morning is too long to go into, but needless to say, there was no cell phone service for a while, and when it was restored, my message box was filled with concerned people. I did not know what I wanted to do with the recording, other than to hold onto, so when I could I purchased some kind of suction recorder from Radio Shack and transferred. A year later, still very much haunted, and still going through a lot of footage I had shot before 9-11 of lower Manhattan, I took some of the outtakes featuring the towers and married it with the voicemails with the intention of making another portrait of that day." —Azazel Jacobs