Meyerowitz's show begins in the hallway leading to the former basketball court with "before" and "after" photographs — before and after the clean up.
The "after" photo is not dated. The site resembles the beginning of a construction project, except the remaining structures — partial foundation walls, pieces of parking deck, slabs of concrete — are torn at the edges, burned or smoke stained, and the remaining structural elements — columns, steel beams and rebar — are bent and stripped bare, as if they were intentionally twisted, then cleaned and abandoned. Hundreds of trucks and trailers, illuminated by high intensity lamps, populate the cleaned and orderly site. Intact buildings, dimly and indirectly lit, surround and loom over the site in the night sky. Scrubbed of its above ground recent history, it looks like an orderly urban archeological dig.
The "before" picture is dated September 27, 2001. We see the site from ground level. One fragile piece of a building's façade — now an iconic visual symbol of the event — leans in the center of the photograph. Buildings on the periphery show busted windows and bruised veneers. Wisps of smoke rise above the debris. The acres of strewn remnants resemble toys, jewelry, matchsticks, paper money, sand and dirt spun on the grind in the blender and thrown on an architectural model.
Police and firemen, the advance guard clean up crew, stand in small groups and stare in no particular direction, like orphans in the ruins of Dresden. There's work to be done, and it will get done, but this day's stun phase has yet to pass. The men in hardhats and jumpsuits appear dwarfed by the enormity of the task ahead. To me, only the "after" photo to the left makes the task appear even possible. The "after" for me is still evolving — my after is me standing here, right now, still thinking it's not possible.
Meyerowitz found a daycare center room adjacent to Ground Zero. On six square feet of floor are paper cutouts, name tags on strings and four toy cars, all evenly covered with a quarter inch of very fine dust. The dust is embossed with patterned footprints from the soles of work boots. They look like the footprints from the moon's surface. Men prancing on the moon was more believable, and was possible to swallow. This I can't swallow. The kids appear to have left this room 100 years ago.
The size of Ground Zero is conveyed by the bigness of the photographs and by the cavernous central gallery on the second floor of the museum. I walk up a walled stairway to the second floor. The steel truss ceiling is 50 feet overhead. At the top stair landing, I see the largest photograph in the show — a panoramic view of destruction that I can't quite wrap my head around. Walking up from below is like ascending from the bowels of a parking garage to emerge and witness the obliteration of your only known world. Makes you want to turn around, drive home, grab the sherry off the shelf and go back to bed.
"The Twin Towers, September 25, 2001" is 7 feet tall and 16 feet across. Stadium lights border the photograph and illuminate the chaos through a milky mist of smoke rising under a blue/black starless sky. Burnt orange beams hang over scarred foundation like spaghetti dropped over children's building blocks. All color has melted, meshed and dimmed to dry dung. Stilled cranes tower over the monochromatic heaps. The remaining lattice façade — a national cerebral snapshot as durable as the wailing woman at Kent State — leans weak kneed, doomed and defiant, as grand and pitiful as a loved one's final gasp.
This photograph, like most of the pictures here, is filled with endless detail — booms, concrete, fire trucks, dumpsters, structural steel, glass, paper, dust, dirt. Scrutinizing the laundry list of carnage is like counting the buttons on the corpses at Gettysburg — sanity demands a reprieve. You can't take it all in at once; it won't compute or register.
Joel Meyerowitz talked about his walks across the grounds in an interview: "Down in the pile itself, woven into this nightmarish carpet, were fragile things, like identification cards, and things people leave on their desks, little invitations and scraps of little yellow paper, stick-it note pads, and those funny little toys from the top of pencils. You'd walk along and see stuffed animals that people have on their desks impaled on all kinds of residue from the fall. So these odd collections of things are horrific, in the sense that they make it so tender and personal on the one hand, while it's chaotic on the other."
Meyerowitz walks us through these early months after the fall with other, smaller pictures, less numbing pictures.
One untitled piece shows a sunset on the site perhaps 50 days into the dig. The sun reveals the concrete lattice and surrounding buildings with luminous red and yellow light. An unmanned cherry picker hangs 50 feet above the smoke and ashes. Three men stand in the foreground, hard hats discussing the coming day. Another group of five stands in the background on the remains of a parking platform. A bisected and torched concrete structure stands behind the foreground group. Backhoes, cranes and bulldozers are getting cranked up for the day. In the top half of the photo the new God-given day dawns bright and crisp. The lower half of the photo — burned, dark, twisted and torn — will remain, for the foreseeable future, in perpetual night. The clustered men are monitors of today's darkness, engineering tomorrow's manmade recovery.
"A Memorial, October 28, 2001" is a photograph of a fireman planting a bouquet of flowers into a pile of dirt. He places the flowers at the edge of a collection of memorials — red ribbons, a teddy bear, photographs, flags — arranged on the top edge of an earthen pile of debris. Behind and above him, above and beyond the top edge of the photograph, is a frozen cascade of remnants from the tower's fall. Above him hangs a shower of metal, wire, concrete, steel studs, insulation, wires and light fixtures fixed in a frozen, jagged armature.
The anonymous fireman gains purchase needed to jam the stems of his bouquet into the crusty pile by digging his right knee into the pile and pushing off his left knee with his open hand. He is dressed in caution yellow and black and his face is hidden under his helmet. He looks fragile and fleshy and small, dwarfed beneath the tangled web above him; kneeling with his head dropped, he looks humbled and full of sorrow. His token of homage and remembrance is a band aid over a hemorrhaged heart, but he leaves us with little doubt that he, and we, will recover.
Meyerowitz documented the recovery for us and later, in an interview about the film Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero, he spoke about what he took from the site: "Since September 11, what's emerged for me as a possibility is a unifying spirituality; not necessarily identified with a God, but a sense of human capacity for spiritual practice. To see the salvage efforts of the workers down there... seems to have enlarged the possibility of this unifying embrace. That there is a force that brings people together in a moment of crisis and holds them together, so they don't fall out of this back to the individual corrupt ways of daily life... It's inspiring — I believe in that ability now... the generosity of individuals to form a congregation around a necessity."
Five firemen stand on the sidewalk outside the disaster's edges, just beyond squat concrete road barriers, the low gates of hell. Arms wrap shoulders as they huddle and stare at the sidewalk.
On the drive back from Hickory, I think about Rodney King and author Ann Lamott and their profoundly naive ideas, and the possible confluence of respective simple question and simple answer. Rodney King asked, "Why can't we all just get along?" and Ann Lamott says she writes her books bird by bird. (Ann Lamott's father told her panicked and blubbering brother how to write his dreaded essay on birds in the northern hemisphere — You've got to write it one bird at a time, bird by bird.) Rodney King's question is answered by Lamott's silly rule.
Everyman's own Ground Zero is his own heart, and each heart reaches an aftermath following the passage of personal, cultural, political and religious indoctrination and upheaval. Each deserves, likely requires, a clean up. How? Bird by bird, word by word, man by man. Impossible? Yeah, but so was the collapse and the clean up.
The exhibit Aftermath: Images from Ground Zero runs through April 18 at the Hickory Museum of Art, 243 Third Avenue NE, Hickory. For directions, call 828-327-8576 or go to www.HickoryMuseumofArt.org.
