A&L speaker gives close-up look at Ground Zero
No other person has seen and recorded what Joel Meyerowitz did.
The native New Yorker lived 20 blocks from the World Trade Center. After the towers fell, he fought bureaucracy to record the subsequent images in photographs.
Sept. 16, 2001, Meyerowitz stood five blocks north of Ground Zero and began trying to document the destruction.
“I stood on the fringes of the World Trade Center, and they had already put up a fence so that you could really not see anything,” he said. “As I raised my camera to my eye, I felt a sharp blow to my shoulder and heard a stern voice say, ‘No photographs; this is a crime scene.’
“I thought to myself, ‘No photographs equals no history; I’m going to make an archive.'”
After talking to a high-ranking friend and pulling a few strings, Meyerowitz obtained a worker’s pass and a letter saying he could go into Ground Zero.
“I later got a badge as the Mayor’s Official Photographer. The mayor didn’t know that, but that’s what it said,” he said. “It was never really official. It was sort of slipping-through-the-system legal. I got asked to leave every day until I made friends with the Arson and Explosions Squad Detectives.
“I’d do anything to stay in there.”
Meyerowitz spoke in the TSC Ballroom on Wednesday and presented “Inside the Forbidden City: Eight Months of Photography of Ground Zero” to about 400 people.
Of the 8,000 photos he took, he showed about 50 during his presentation. The pictures showed construction workers, police officers, broken pieces of artwork, chaplains, flowers and firefighters.
“I tried to take pictures of everyone who went in there so it would be a real archive,” he said. “To stand up against this pile and realize that all this dust was concrete and what fell down was blended up steel made me feel horrible about all the deaths of those people.
“The pictures were still on the walls in a hotel by the tower. Often one would see these strange, surreal, humble results. I wanted to be conscious of everything that was going on down there.”
Meyerowitz spent 10 to 14 hours a day at Ground Zero and was the only “resident eye” there, he said.
Hearing Meyerowitz speak was particularly meaningful for four members of the audience. Wednesday marked the one-year anniversary of the first night Ruth Eller, Stephen Sturgeon and Catherine and Howard Tanner volunteered at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, the closest untouched building to Ground Zero.
“It was a respite center for the workers from the very beginning,” Eller said of the church. “It was a place for people to connect.”
The group from Logan worked night shifts at the church for one week — keeping press out, giving foot massages and being sources of comfort for the workers and family members of those who died.
“All the supplies were donated; all the people in there were volunteers,” Sturgeon said. “It was this huge magnetic pull for people to come here.”
Every wall was covered with signs that children from around the world sent to those in mourning.
“It was absolutely overwhelming emotionally to walk in,” Catherine said.
Both Meyerowitz and Howard said it was emotional to see all the workers stop what they were doing anytime a body was found.
“There were over 2,000 people in there at any one time, but if any remnant was found, the whole operation would shut down,” Howard said.
Meyerowitz said, “There were 72 machines in the site at all times. But whenever any remains were found, all work would stop, and everyone would take their helmet off and salute or put their hand over their heart. They did it to honor the dead.”
Even the search dogs became neurotic after spending time in Ground Zero, Meyerowitz said.
“They couldn’t find anyone alive, so they began to not want to go in anymore because they felt like failures,” he said.
The pictures Meyerowitz took have become an archive for the Museum of New York, so future generations can understand the history of the events surrounding Sept. 11, 2001. He is also working on a book about his experiences, but no date has been set for its completion.
The government has sent large prints of Meyerowitz’s photos to more than 60 countries; one of the prints is 22-feet long.
“The State Department wanted to show ‘friends and enemies alike’ that we bleed just like everyone else, but we go on,” Meyerowitz said. “It’s become bigger than I ever could have imagined. More than anything, I just wanted to be useful.”
–kcartwright@cc.usu.edu