By Joel Meyerowitz
Published by Phaidon Press. Hardcover edition, 2006
After September 11th, 2001, the Ground Zero site in
New York City was classified as a crime scene and only
those directly involved in the recovery efforts were allowed
inside. The press was also prohibited from the site, but
with the help of the Museum of the City of New York and
sympathetic city officials, award-winning photographer
Joel Meyerowitz managed to obtain unlimited access. By
ingenuity and sheer determination, he was the only photographer
granted unimpeded right of entry into Ground Zero.
For 9 months, during the day and night, Meyerowitz photographed
"the pile," as the World Trade Center came to
be known, and the over 800 people a day that were working
in it. Influenced by Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange's
work for the Farm Security Administration during the Great
Depression, he knew that if he didn't make a photographic
record of the unprecedented recovery efforts, "there
would be no history."
