Images of the Aftermath
Photographer stuck by his guns to shoot at Ground Zero after the Sept. 11
attacks

Sunday, February 27, 2005

By Tom Patterson

SPECIAL TO THE JOURNAL

HICKORY - Without Joel Meyerowitz's determination and persistence, there
might have been no visual record of the mammoth effort to reclaim the land
in Lower Manhattan where the World Trade Center towers once stood and
recover the remains of those killed in the towers' destruction on Sept. 11,
2001.

Meyerowitz is a native New Yorker and an internationally known photographer.
Thanks to him, an archive exists of about 8,500 color photographs
documenting work at the site. He began recording these images shortly after
the towers were destroyed by hijacked jetliners, and he continued until a
little more than eight months later, when the clearance and reclamation
phase of work at Ground Zero ended.

Meyerowitz selected 31 of these photos for his traveling exhibition,
"Aftermath: Images from Ground Zero," which is on view at the Hickory Museum
of Art through April 18.

In a recent telephone interview, Meyerowitz explained why he took on the
ambitious project and was the only photographer who participated in it.

He also discussed the subterfuge he had to use in order to maintain it. He
said that the greatest obstacle he faced was the resistance he encountered
from city officials - a problem that he began to experience on his first
visit to Ground Zero, five days after the attacks.

At the time of the attacks, Meyerowitz lived in New York's West Village,
relatively close to the World Trade Center, but he was at another home that
he also owns on Cape Cod. It wasn't until the weekend after the towers fell
that he returned home and got his first look at the site. He found it partly
obscured by a tarpaulin-draped cyclone fence that had been hastily put up
four blocks to the north to keep out unauthorized visitors.

"Above the fence you could see smoke rising and the upper parts of the
damaged buildings," he said. "And as I was standing in the crowd of
onlookers there, I raised my camera to my eye to get a sense of what was
going on, even though there was nothing to photograph. At that moment, a
woman police officer jabbed me in the shoulder and threatened me, saying,
'No cameras allowed. This is a crime scene.'"

Meyerowitz said he argued with the police officer, saying, "'They can't do
this to us! This is history, and they have no right to take away our
understanding of what's going on in there!'" When this approach proved
ineffective, he said, "I could feel the anger and the social consciousness
rising in me, and I told myself, then and there, that I would make this
record of the site and give it away to the people of New York."

In order to fulfill this vow, he said, he immediately sought official
permission for the project, but it proved to be nearly impossible to secure,
despite his longstanding reputation as an urban photographer. He said that
instead of welcoming his volunteer effort, authorities in Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani's office resisted it. Although he was able to secure an official
letter of permission and a special pass to photograph the site on a
relatively brief, temporary basis, he said that he had to resort to forging
documents and other deceptive practices in order to gain continued access to
the site.

Meyerowitz said that workers' passes were issued in a different color each
week of their work at Ground Zero, and that he used a computer to replicate
his initial pass in the appropriate color each week. He said that he
befriended a number of people working in official capacities at the site,
and that those who proved most helpful to him were detectives from the New
York Police Department's arson and explosions squad, who provided him with
their direct-access phone number.

"I would wear the workers' passes in different colors, so that you could see that I'd been through each phase of the work there, but that didn't always work," he said. "Sometimes I would be thrown out, and then I would call the detectives. They would come and get me, and they'd take me back in with them and ream out whoever had thrown me out."

Meyerowitz said that when this special police squad was about to complete its work at the site, the detective in charge arranged for Meyerowitz to obtain a special police tag identifying him as a "mayoral photographer."

"The mayor didn't know about it, so in that sense it wasn't legitimate," he said. "But after that, nobody could say 'no' to me when I came onto the site. This is a great story about real democracy, because those guys stood up against the mayor and the police commissioner so that I could complete this project."

Meyerowitz said he was impressed with the dedication of the workers whose efforts he documented, and that they brought "a palpable sense of spiritual uplift" to the site. Sometimes, he said, they told him about dramatic scenes that he had missed photographing. For example, he said, one day a worker told him about a swarm of 50 or more Monarch butterflies that had suddenly appeared, fluttering in the smoke above the ruins, as if they were the souls of victims killed in the attacks. "To me that was beautiful and poetic, and I cherish that he had the kind of sweetness to say something like that."

Recalling one of many other memorable exhanges that he had with Ground Zero workers, Meyerowitz said said that late one afternoon he was about to photograph a pile of residue freshly removed from the site's devastated core to be inspected for remains. "It was the 5 o'clock shift change, and just as I was about to make the picture, a man came along and picked up a rake and started raking through these remains," he said. "So I walked over to talk with the guy, and he said to me, 'We're gardeners, and this is a garden of the dead.'"

Meyerowitz said that after being raked, such piles of rubble were more closely inspected by trowel-bearing workers who labored on their hands and knees. "That's the single most enduring image I have of the whole experience," he said. "

One of the first pictures I made at Ground Zero is of a group of men in a hole digging with hand trowels, and the very last one I made is of guys on their hands and knees digging. That humble image of a man on his hands and knees, whether to plant seeds or to bury someone - it's an eternal gesture."

Meyerowitz said he brought his photo-documentary work at Ground Zero to a halt only when the search for human remains ended and the site was closed in May 2002.

-Joel Meyerowitz's exhibition "Aftermath: Images from Ground Zero" is scheduled to remain on view at the Hickory Museum of Art through April 18. For more information, call (828) 327-8576.