…As I stood in the crowd on the corner of Chambers and Greenwich Streets, about four blocks north of Ground Zero, I was overcome by a sense of uselessness. Giving blood was unnecessary by then; giving money was helpful, but passive; making sandwiches or cheering the workers leaving the site didn’t feel like enough.  And of course the most necessary work—moving steel and searching for survivors—had by now been taken over by people who were professionally trained to do those jobs.  And yet my sense of powerlessness did nothing to calm my deep yearning to be useful.

There wasn’t much to see from where I was standing, but out of a lifetime of habit I raised my Leica to my eye, simply to get the feel of what was there. Whack! Someone behind me poked me sharply in the shoulder. “No photographs buddy, this is a crime scene!”  I whipped around and found myself face to face with a belligerent female police officer. I was furious—both at being hit and at the absurdity of the command.  “Listen, this is a public space,” I replied. “Don’t tell me I can’t look through my camera!” But she came right back at me with “You give me trouble and I’ll take that camera away from you!” “No you won’t,” I said.  “Suppose I was the press?” “The press? There’s the press,” she said, imperiously jerking a thumb over her shoulder at about a dozen TV cameramen and reporters, roped off by yellow police tape, halfway up the block.  “When are they going in?” I asked.  “Never,” she said. “I told you, this is a crime scene. No photography!”

Sometimes life gives you just the push you need. My destiny was altered by that cop’s smack on my shoulder: she became, in a Zen-like way, my teacher, sending me back into the world more conscious than I had been the moment before we met. They can’t do this to us, I thought. No photographs meant no visual record of one of the most profound things ever to happen here.  We had been attacked.  Now we had to bury our dead, rebuild our infrastructure, and reclaim our city.  This was a part of our shared experience that every New Yorker—indeed, every American—had a right to know about.  There needed to be a record of the aftermath.  As I walked north past the press corps, penned in and waiting, my fury gave way to a sense of elation, a thrill at the implications of my idea. I was going to get in there and make an archive of everything that happened at Ground Zero.  This was something that I knew I could do…

…I was the observer, but as I made my tours around the pile I was also being observed—especially by anyone who had a stationary post—and slowly, as the weeks passed, I could feel myself being woven into the fabric of the site.  The volunteer outside the food tent would try to entice me with a granola bar; the fireman at his post might tell me something funny that I’d missed earlier in the day.  “Hey, photographer,” strangers would call out to me—pointing me toward something that had just been turned up, or tipping me off about something that was about to come down.  And there was always the need for talk.  There were small knots of men everywhere on the site—waiting for heavy machinery to pass at a crossing, or hanging around next to the raking fields, or standing by a makeshift shrine—and many of them were eager to tell you what had happened to them, or what they were thinking, or how they were feeling.  Part of what I was there to do, I came to feel, was not simply to watch, but also to listen.  As a result, I cried with men on the site almost every day.  Often, I didn’t even know their names.

The nine months I worked at Ground Zero were among the most rewarding of my life.  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, and I was accepted on the site as a member of the tribe.  Photography is often a very solitary profession.  But the intense camaraderie I experienced at Ground Zero inspired me, changing both my sense of myself and my sense of responsibility to the world around me.  September 11th was a tragedy of almost unfathomable proportions.  But living for nine months in the midst of those individuals who faced that tragedy head-on, day after day, and did what they could to set things right, was an immense privilege.  I am deeply grateful to have worked alongside these men and women.  I documented the aftermath for everyone who couldn’t be there.  But this book is dedicated to those who were.

- Joel Meyerowitz

Credit:
From AFTERMATH: THE WORLD TRADE CENTER ARCHIVE
By Joel Meyerowitz, published by Phaidon Press