(AP Illustration/Peter Hamlin)

Fleeing a collapsing World Trade Center tower on 9/11. (AP Photo/Suzanne Plunkett)

You recall the courageous rescue workers charging into the World Trade Center inferno. You saw innumerable images of carnage. Ever thought about the photographers inside the death zone who captured those staggering pictures?

This is the gamble and the conceit of "Watching the World Change: The Stories Behind the Images of 9/11" -- that you'll care enough about this Sept. 11 subgroup to seek out another collection of back stories.

David Friend's book invites the reader to revisit the pictures that shocked the world, but not in the conventional coffee-table book presentation. This 348-page volume is almost all words, with only about three dozen photos tucked into its midsection.

Those carefully culled pictures are among the most powerful from Sept. 11, 2001, and its immediate aftermath in New York: A sequence of a jetliner diving into the first tower. A harrowing series of pictures as the south tower begins to collapse. Men running for their lives, terrified, as a tsunami of debris and dust chases them through lower Manhattan.

What is unnerving about the book is that it forces a reopening of mental files stuffed with imagery and emotion -- files many of us, five years on, had long locked away. For Friend's stories are mostly about photos that do not appear in his slender picture section. We must go retrieve them in our mental hard drives, where they are bound up with grief.

Those stories that are accompanied by pictures are all the more devastating -- none more so than the photo that came to be known as "The Falling Man."

Captured by Associated Press photographer Richard Drew, the picture shows a man plummeting headfirst toward earth, the muscular vertical lines of the World Trade Center behind him. What horrors above had driven him to jump? What terror was flashing through his brain? How is it possible that he appears calm? Is he unconscious? Has he made peace with his death?

It is impossible to see this picture -- again -- and not re-experience the nightmare of Sept. 11.

Friend devotes nearly six pages to analyzing the power of the picture and to Drew's own account of what he experienced. And here is the issue with "Watching the World Change": It's interesting reading, but it's still dwarfed by the baseball-bat-across-the-face impact of the image itself.

For the reader seeking a means to pay private homage to 9/11, to force himself to REMEMBER, wouldn't a book of simple pictures be better?

Friend is now the editor of creative development at Vanity Fair magazine and was formerly Life magazine's director of photography. He is a confessed photophile. And other photo junkies are probably his most fertile audience, along with close-in survivors who want to taste trade center dust again.

The author seems to go out of his way to avoid photographer's jargon, to ensure the book is accessible to a wide audience, but talk of f-stops and shutter speeds creeps in. Newsroom debates about whether to run shocking pictures are probably most fascinating to people who work in, well, newsrooms.

In seeking a new angle on a 5-year-old, hyperexposed news event, Friend uses photography as the narrative device to weave together vastly disparate topics: Osama bin Laden's obsession with his image in the news; America's growing fluency with PhotoShop and the picture software's use in homegrown missing-persons placards; the rise of a "surveillance culture" in which security cameras in a big city might capture a person's image hundreds of times a day; the blurring lines between professional photojournalists and the amateurs armed with point-and-shoots who generated many of the day's most riveting pictures.

The narrative device is as transparent as a photo negative, and feels a bit forced. The reader seeking a fresh take on Sept. 11 gets much more than he bargained for, as Friend puts the country on the psychologist's couch, trying to divine the significance of so many New Yorkers reaching for their cameras amid the crisis.

That seems so self-evident as to obviate the need for a book on the topic. We knew we were "watching the world change."

Friend tells us in the book's introduction that his volume "is meant to explore our collective visual memory in the digital era."

In five years, more than enough said. Just give us the photos, please, and a moment of silence.

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Scott Lindlaw, a former White House reporter, covers homeland security in the AP's San Francisco bureau.

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