05-23-2002, 11:20 AM
NYTimes: Photographer at Ground Zero
What do you think? Is it right to find beauty in a disaster?
Quote:Even in a Moonscape of Tragedy, Beauty Is in the Eye
By SARAH BOXER
Is it unseemly now or ever to talk about the beauty of the World Trade Center's ruins? When the towers collapsed, the photographer Joel Meyerowitz was 300 miles away, on Cape Cod. Twelve days later he was closer than any other photographer. He now has thousands of photographs documenting the rescue, recovery and raking of the site, and admits to an obsession.
But there is something beyond obsession. With these photographs a crucial turning point has been reached in the visual history of ground zero. For the first time the ruins are being presented as beautiful.
"I wasn't going to limit myself to making it only a drear and tragic event," Mr. Meyerowitz said yesterday during a phone interview. "The worst happened the day the towers fell."
Then beauty slipped in. Photographing the aftermath was "a lesson in transcendence," he said.
"This event will fade, and time and nature will move us along," Mr. Meyerowitz continued. And in some sense, nature already has taken over. Mankind attacked the towers, he said, but "the forces of nature brought it down." That is, gravity made the buildings collapse.
"Nature strewed things about in a particular way," he said, in a way that was awesomely beautiful. And the light itself had a way of transforming the site of horror.
A few weeks ago Mr. Meyerowitz presented "After Sept. 11: Images From Ground Zero," a slide show and talk about his photographic adventures in what he called "the forbidden city." During that talk at New York University Law School, sponsored by the New York Institute for the Humanities, he used the word beauty more than once. He spoke of nostalgia. And there was even some bravado.
At one point in the evening Mr. Meyerowitz asked for a show of hands. "How many people have been to the site?" Lots of hands shot up. "In the site?" he queried doubtfully. The hands came down.
It was not easy getting into the site, he explained.
Before Sept. 11 Mr. Meyerowitz, who is known for his color landscapes, cityscapes and street scenes, often photographed the trade towers as a kind of urban mountain range, for the light and air around them.
After the disaster everything changed. The mountains were piles of twisted metal. The dominant elements were smoke and water. And it was nearly impossible to get close. When he first aimed his camera at ground zero, he said, a police officer, a woman, punched him in the shoulder and rebuked him: "No photos, buddy! This is a crime scene."
Mr. Meyerowitz reached for his nonexistent press card, but before he could come up empty-handed, the officer directed him to the press area cordoned off with yellow police tape. Mr. Meyerowitz vowed that he would not be among the penned-in press corps. And he kept his promise.
He went instead to the Museum of the City of New York and asked Robert R. MacDonald, the director, for a letter to get him into the site. In return Mr. Meyerowitz told Mr. MacDonald that the museum would get all of the ground zero pictures he produced.
The letter did not do much good as a ticket to ground zero. Mr. Meyerowitz kept getting tossed out, until finally he found someone who took him seriously. That was Amodeo Pulley, a detective in the Arson and Explosion Squad, who encouraged Mr. Meyerowitz to call him whenever he had trouble getting in. "I called every single day," Mr. Meyerowitz said.
Now, after months of shooting four or five days a week, Mr. Meyerowitz has amassed 7,000 photographs. A show of 27 of those pictures, sponsored by the United States State Department, is now traveling the world. Mr. Meyerowitz plans to finish shooting only when the last column from the World Trade Center is finally draped in a flag and removed, in about three weeks. He and the Museum of the City of New York are seeking funds for an exhibition of the photographs planned for August in the lobby at 195 Broadway, at Fulton Street.
During the slide show Mr. Meyerowitz showed an assortment of his pictures, starting with a shot of a 70-foot-deep pile of wreckage. He explained: "One floor fell on top of another," so that as many as 10 floors were compressed into about a foot of space, like an immense book. "What fell was mostly metal," he said. The cement vaporized. "To not see concrete was astonishing," he added.
Mr. Meyerowitz said he is not attracted by natural disasters and wars. "But to see the physical spectacle opened my eyes to what you could photograph." Was he looking for art among the ruins? One picture, taken in the dark, showed firefighters at the south tower who had found one of their own. The scene was "laid out in front of me, like `Night Watch' " he said, referring to the Rembrandt painting.
A shot of rescue workers sitting around on assorted chairs that had come out of the World Trade Center — cafeteria chairs, conference chairs, Alvar Aalto chairs — recalled to him, he said, photographs of Civil War soldiers sitting in front of their tents.
Small rescue cities, he noted, popped up near the site. And they got more elaborate as time wore on. There were tarpaulins, then party tents, then a wooden house with windows built for the firefighters. The biggest white tent, with showers, massages and a dining room was called the Taj Mahal.
There were wash stations, too. "You couldn't leave the site without being hosed down," he said. And there were scrims: over windows, over buildings and over trucks. Even the tombstones at St. Paul's Chapel were protected with tiny white tents.
Mr. Meyerowitz betrayed a flair for poetry. Showing a picture of a parking meter with its glass front gone, he noted that "the heat must have kissed every parking meter" within blocks of the site. One day, he said, a tiny flock of monarch butterflies flew out of a pile of metal. Someone stood up and said, "Souls."
Mr. Meyerowitz described the sensuous experience of ground zero. Every time "a grappler would pull out a piece of metal, oxygen would rush in" and there would be an explosion, then smoke. There was the noise of grinding construction and then pockets of quiet. Once a bugler had slipped into the site and was playing taps. "It was so profound a lament."
There is, Mr. Meyerowitz said, "a nostalgia for the beginning, the good feeling," the hopefulness that survivors would be found, "the uplifting moment of helping."
Now that ground zero is a construction site, "people remember the good old days," he said. Mr. Meyerowitz showed gorgeous pictures of the ruins against a blue sky laced with pink clouds.
As the slide show went on, the fall turned into winter, and you could see the disaster site beginning to clear. There was a picture of a girl with a cart carrying sandwiches and soup. The big globe-shaped sculpture was removed. Toward the end of the excavation you could see "the bathtub wall," where water from the river started seeping into the site.
"It really was beautiful down there," Mr. Meyerowitz admitted. He showed a half-dozen pictures of the Woolworth Building, standing tall beyond the heap of rubble at the World Trade Center site, as it turned from red, to gold, to white, to gray. "An accidental beauty comes up," he said, looking at a photograph of a worker leaning on an I-beam, as if he were waiting for a beer at a bar.
Mr. Meyerowitz photographed collections of things and sights: beams, chairs, tents, wires, welders' doodles in steel, fire hoses, tree stumps, men with duct tape around their legs. But he particularly liked photographing at night. The lot was lighted by stage lights, movie lights, he said, and it was great for taking pictures. He recalled shooting the grapplers as they would take "a huge mouthful in a net," shake it and drop it. "The men would dive into it like they were kids going into the surf." If they found remains, they would take off their hats.
Mr. Meyerowitz was not the only one taking pictures. One of the flagmen hired to work at ground zero shot 70 rolls of film and told Mr. Meyerowitz he hoped to do a book someday. But Mr. Meyerowitz may have been the only photographer who admitted to looking for beauty. "Anytime I found a person who seemed remarkable to me, I photographed him."
One of the most consistent sights at ground zero was the firefighters in their yellow jackets raking the land "like shepherds in a field." One day Mr. Meyerowitz watched a fireman nicknamed Toolie who was just ending his shift but could not stop working. "He picked up a rake," Mr. Meyerowitz said, and began working again. He just wanted to find something. He explained to Mr. Meyerowitz, "We're gardeners in the garden of the dead."
What do you think? Is it right to find beauty in a disaster?
