Some images come across as clumsily disinterested, like a group documenting thousands gathered for a memorial service that October. Meyerowitz says it reflects his attempt to “get out of the [viewer’s] way,” a noble goal, but sometimes I wish he’d done more to get into the hearts of the sad, wary firefighters still seeking bits of lost sons and brothers six months after the attack. We remember great documentary photographers for how they catch us up in the middle of things, not for how dispassionate they are. Maybe the emotions were still too raw for him to get closer.
Occasionally too he forces a point, like the photo of the cover of Apocalypse Now in a store window, or the lost glove next to train tracks at the bottom of the emptied pit with a bit of grass beginning to sprout. (Rebirth, get it?) But these seem small quibbles amid the grandeur of the best images.
Revisiting these sad scenes five years later prompts questions about the legacy of September 11. Are we safer now? The numerous al-Qaeda attacks abroad and our government’s inept response to Hurricane Katrina suggest we’re not. An Army reservist recently showed me a snapshot of a US camp hastily set up during the opening days of the Iraq war; it was named for a firefighter killed on September 11. All I could think of was how we’ve been sidetracked and distracted, how many opportunities we’ve missed, since we swore five years ago never to forget the thousands of our fellow citizens who were murdered.
By the end of Aftermath, nine months of clean-up have left a new concrete basement devoid of signs of trauma. It could be any construction site. It feels smaller. I’ve been back there, and, just as Meyerowitz shows it, it’s anticlimactic. The clean-up, magnificently quick and professional, didn’t heal the wound, it just patched the surface.
Joel Meyerowitz | Brattle Theatre, 40 Brattle St, Cambridge | September 14, 6 pm | $5 | 617.661.1515.
