The horrific images of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 – the fires, jumpers, buildings collapsing and massive clouds of dust – are irreversibly incised on the American and, indeed, world memory.
But what happened during the months afterward is less clear. Although news reports offered glimpses of the enormous rescue and clean-up effort, a security perimeter around the site kept journalists and others at a distance.
Joel Meyerowitz, a much-exhibited photographer who lived north of the site on 19th Street and had been working on a series of cityscapes shot from his loft window with the World Trade Center center-stage, refused to be deterred.
Though the edict everywhere was “No photographs!” he believed that for the purposes of history there should be an authoritative record, a visual archive of all that transpired in the aftermath of the buildings’ fall, especially the Herculean efforts by hundreds of workers to restore some sense of order.
Through subterfuge, fast-talking and sheer determination, he managed to enter the site on virtually a daily basis through the spring of 2002, often using a large-format camera to shoot hundreds, if not thousands, of amazing and sometimes unforgettable images of what he saw.
Four hundred are collected in “Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive.” This striking, large-format book is sure to stand as one of the essential documents of the World Trade Center disaster – an authoritative and often moving chronicle of America’s response to one of its most grievious wounds ever.
While the full magnitude of the Sept. 11 tragedy permeates virtually every image, its ugliness is offset by the fortitude, selflessness and, yes, heroism shown by the hundreds of firefighters, police officers and workers of all kinds who took part in the follow-up.
Meyerowitz includes individual and group portraits of dozens of such participants, but mostly he shows them at work – Port Authority police bagging money from a bank vault, firefighters discovering five bodies in a stairwell, welders cutting girders into manageable sizes.
As important as these touches of humanity are, the heart and soul of this book lies with the images of the site itself, what the workers called “the pile” – the seemingly endless heaps of broken and bent steel and debris of all kinds, including the grim bits of human remains.
None is more eerily spectacular than Meyerowitz’s assembled nighttime panorama of the site, a detail of which is used on the book’s cover. It was shot a few days after the disaster from the damaged World Financial Center and captures the full intensity of the carnage.
Near the center of everything is the sight that came to symbolize Sept. 11, the bent and scarred remains of the exterior walls at the base the north tower, with their stylized, neogothic archways. The haunting structure, a kind of monument, recurs repeatedly in the book.
An uncomfortable realization is how oddly beautiful many of these scenes are – a contradiction that Meyerwitz constantly had to deal with as he worked.
“It’s hard to come to terms with the awful beauty of a place like this,” he writes in one of the short, first-person accounts that accompany the photos. “After all, the site – thick with grief and death – was dangerous, noisy, dirty, poisonous and costly beyond measure.
“And yet the demolition of Ground Zero was also a spectacle with a cast of thousands, lit by a master lighter and played out on a stage of immense proportions.”
To his great credit, Meyerowitz was there to capture it all for posterity – sensitively, skillfully and artfully.
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Aftermath
World Trade Center Archive
Photographs and text by Joel Meyerowitz
Phaidon, 349 pages, $75
