The 400 photos in Aftermath begin with four placid cityscapes centered on the World Trade Center that Meyerowitz shot between 1983 and September 5, 2001. Paging through them is like being at a horror movie and wanting to holler warnings to kids just going about their business as a monster lurks under the bed. Then the book erupts into panoramas of devastation. Dropped off that first day, Meyerowitz tells me when I call him at his Cape Cod studio, he stood at the foot of the pancaked rubble, eight stories tall and six stories more underground, and thought: “Oh, now I understand why there are no survivors.”
He shot mostly with an unwieldy Deerdorf view camera, exposing 4x5-inch negatives that vacuumed up astonishing detail: tangles of broken girders, dangling cables, bars jutting menacingly from the ground, coils of abandoned fire hose, giant cranes and grapplers. Men in respirators and hardhats pick through the debris; work stops for honor guards to carry out flag-draped scraps of the dead.
“I wanted it to be able to tell everybody on the outside two things, first, what it really looked like inside, because it was a forbidden city, and second, I wanted to give people the chance to grieve that you can only do when you’re given a chance to face something.”
PANORAMA LOOKING EAST: Meyerowitz’s first thought was, “Oh, now I understand why there are no survivors.” |
Images stick with me: the golden afternoon light streaming through the jagged nest of metal, deserted lobbies, a crushed Ford sedan, birds wheeling through the smoke above the wreckage (“It smoked until the end of January”), the antenna from the North Tower tossed onto its side on some street, dust-caked toys left on the floor of a day-care center. Often the scenes are gorgeous, perhaps uncomfortably so. Meyerowitz struggled with a problem many felt at first, the vague feeling that the respectful thing to do would be to avert your eyes, but he decided, “If I was going to be down there and try to make an archive, I couldn’t shrink from beauty or pain or any of the emotions I was going to feel. I would have to deal with them.” The book is peppered with anecdotes, like the one he tells me about Officer George Athanasiou, whom he photographed getting choked up before a temporary memorial at Ground Zero. The policeman was helping people escape when he heard the tower begin to creak. He, his partner, and another officer dashed away, just ahead of the murderous cloud of debris that ripped down trees and bent and melted rows of parking meters. As the cloud was about to engulf them, he dove into the revolving doors of a building. For a few moments, on his radio’s shoulder mic, he could hear the two others lost outside, calling for help, breathing, and then nothing. The photos, powerful as they are, struggle to match such tales.
