25 years after the 11 September assaults, Joel Meyerowitz displays on his Ground Zero images – The Art Newspaper

Like most individuals alive 25 years in the past, Joel Meyerowitz remembers precisely the place he was on 11 September 2001. The New York City native was staying on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, a daily topic of his images, when his spouse known as and advised him to activate the tv. Once he understood the scenario—that two hijacked passenger airplanes had been deliberately crashed into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers—he instantly tried to return to town. As quickly as journey restrictions into Manhattan have been lifted, he went to Ground Zero.

“I thought, ‘Oh, my city was just attacked.’ I mean, what could I do to help?” the photographer, now 88 years previous, remembers. “I can’t give blood. I didn’t want to make sandwiches. I had something else to give and I couldn’t figure out what it was. I knew I had to be inside, and so when I heard that [then-New York mayor Rudolph] Giuliani had banned photography, I knew exactly what I had to do.”

For 9 months following the assaults, Meyerowitz, already famed for serving to to legitimise color images as a severe creative medium, visited Ground Zero to {photograph} the cleanup. He took footage of first responders as they hauled scrap steel and pulled our bodies from the rubble. He shot images of official ceremonies and messages written within the dust-covered home windows of close by storefronts. Intending to make a historic archive of the cleanup, he discovered the expertise profound, affording him a view into the very soul of America.

“What I saw that was, I think, the most important thing—and over time, I’ve come to see it as a really American thing—the devotion of all those men and women… on their hands and knees, scraping through every layer of rubble, looking to find anything that would yield some DNA and give somebody an identity. A tooth, a belt buckle, a bone, some kind of information, a wallet, anything,” he says. “These cops and firemen and volunteers, on their hands and knees, dusting and scraping and sweeping and sifting all through the rubble, looking for this identity, struck me as an extraordinarily American set of values. We have to identify everyone that was lost. So the singularity and individuality of each person was held to such a high standard.”

The ensuing venture, Aftermath (typically offered as Ground Zero), turned an official historic doc, ultimately proven in additional than 200 cities in 60 totally different international locations by the US Department of State, together with on the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2002. This summer season, the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale close to Miami opened an exhibition that includes 28 of Meyerowitz’s images from the sequence to commemorate the twenty fifth anniversary of the assaults.

Bonnie Clearwater, the museum’s director and chief curator, says the establishment determined to point out the pictures after Meyerowitz donated them following a 2024-25 retrospective of his work there. “Upon accepting it we realised that 2026 was the 25th anniversary of [the attacks], which seems like yesterday to me,” she says. “And yet there’s a whole generation that has come up since then that was born after 9/11 and really doesn’t have the same connection with what occurred on that date, the heroism and the loss.”

Going undercover

Pulling off the venture got here with its share of challenges for Meyerowitz. Getting into the positioning required much more tact than getting again into New York City. He needed to forge credentials and name in favours, at one level disguising himself with a borrowed NYPD-labelled hardhat. Eventually, he made some mates in excessive locations, together with officers from the arson squad who assisted him in buying a police badge and different credentials.

It was solely later that the venture was given official help from figures together with the incoming New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and, particularly, then-secretary of state Colin Powell, a fellow native of the Bronx who frolicked with Meyerowitz at Ground Zero. “Almost every time [Powell] came to the site, he would find me and we’d hang out together and walk through the site,” he says.

It was because of Powell’s stewardship that Meyerowitz was made an official cultural ambassador for the United States and was in a position to tour the images around the globe. Though the photographer disapproves of Powell’s later actions in help of the US invasion of Iraq, he says there have been no political motivations behind the exhibition from both himself or the administration.

“I think he fucked up when he went to the United Nations and he basically lied for the [George W.] Bush administration,” Meyerowitz says. “But that’s his problem. That wasn’t mine. My pictures actually told the story, and I didn’t politicise them. I chose all the pictures, so I felt I was in total control.”

Meyerowitz didn’t emerge unscathed from Ground Zero. Many first responders have suffered hostile well being results attributable to their work on the positioning, and the photographer has handled respiratory points for years, though in some respects he is likely one of the fortunate ones—most members of the arson squad he knew, for example, have died within the intervening quarter-century. Still, he says, he wouldn’t commerce his expertise for something.

“It was a calling,” he says. “I don’t regret a minute of it. It was actually some of the most profound human experiences I’ve ever had.”

• Joel Meyerowitz: Aftermath, till 14 February, NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, Florida