AT GROUND ZERO
For nine months after Sept. 11, 2001, Joel Meyerowitz photographed the faces and activities at the World Trade Center site. EILEEN DEMPSEY talked with him.
In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, Joel Meyerowitz felt compelled to record history unfolding at Ground Zero the best way he knew how: with his camera.
The only photographer to gain unimpeded access to the site, Meyerowitz unflinchingly documented rescue, recovery, demolition, and excavation efforts from September through the following May.
“The nine months I worked at Ground Zero were among the most rewarding of my life,” Meyerowitz wrote in the introduction to his recent book Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive.
“I came in as an outsider, an observer bent on keeping the record, but over time I began to feel a part of the very project I’d been intent on recording. . . . I documented the aftermath for everyone who couldn’t be there. But this book is dedicated to those who were.”
Aftermath was published last fall to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the attack.
Meyerowitz also created the World Trade Center Archive to house his images of the destruction and recovery at Ground Zero and the immediate neighborhood. The more than 8,000 photos in the archive are available at museums in New York and Washington, D.C.
In addition, the U.S. State Department asked Meyerowitz and the Museum of the City of New York to create a special exhibition of 28 images from the archive to send around the world. Some 3.5 million people viewed the photos as the exhibit traveled to 60 countries.
Ironically, although Meyerowitz has made a fine living as a photographer—with numerous awards and almost 20 books to his credit—he never took a photography class while at Ohio State. Instead, he studied painting and medical illustration.
“Painting was loose and open, while the other was very disciplined and controlled. I liked the friction between the two,” he said during a phone call from his summer home on Cape Cod. He splits his time between the Cape and New York City, where he has a studio.
Meyerowitz recalled a scene from his freshman year when his teacher asked the students to draw a poplar tree growing outside the old art building on campus.
“She told me that I captured the ‘essence’ of the tree,” he said. “This was my first epiphany as an artist. Later, she gave me a book to read called Zen in the Art of Archery. That slender volume became my spiritual guide during my entire life.”
He drew strength and guidance from the book as he worked on the physically, emotionally, and financially demanding World Trade Center project.
“The whole way I’ve lived my life, starting with the kinds of principles that the book suggested, allowed me to experience the aftermath in a completely sympathetic way, rather than as somebody trying to make an essay or a pure documentation,” Meyerowitz said. “I was faced with the enormous complexity of that site, and the chaos was everywhere. It was hard to get a bearing on anything except the ceaseless activity of the destruction.”
At first, he struggled to gain—and then maintain—access to the scene. Police officers guarding the rubble repeatedly ejected him. But he persevered, and the more time he spent at the site, day and night, the more he felt himself merging with the activity and energy. Workers began to recognize him and accept him. A group of detectives with the city’s arson and explosion squad gave him their cell phone numbers and ran interference to keep him on the site.
Meyerowitz compared himself to embedded journalists in Iraq, who become part of the action in order to accurately report what’s happening on the war front. He said he often found himself crying with workers and volunteers as they shared their stories.“My view wasn’t as an outsider.
I was an insider. I was part of it, and that allowed my heart to stay soft, and allowed me not to see this as a job, but as an extraordinary phenomenon. My trip started on top of the pile and ended up on bedrock in Manhattan below sea level, all by myself in an empty space. That was an incredible trip.”
On May 30, 2002, the flag-draped final column was removed from Ground Zero. Less than a month later, Meyerowitz returned to the site and photographed shoots of grass growing amid debris on a railroad track. The scene is one of the final images in the book.
“It was a sign, and it was incredibly encouraging,” he said. “We all need a sign to go on, and sometimes the world offers these little symbolic references.”
Photos from Aftermath, by Joel Meyerowitz, published by Phaidon Press, 2006.
This article was published in the Sept./Oct. issue of Ohio State Alumni Magazine. OSAM is a benefit of membership in the Alumni Association. To get your copy when it's hot off the press, join now.
