“TRULY SACRED SPACE, PURIFIED BY LOSS…”: MEYEROWITZ’ AFTERMATH, SIGNED BY HIM

MEYEROWITZ, Joel. Aftermath. World Trade Center Archive. (New York and London: Phaidon Press, 2006). Folio, original blue cloth, original dust jacket. $185.

First edition of Meyerowitz’ profoundly moving photochronicle of recovery work at Ground Zero, with hundreds of color photographs, many full-page, and four folding panoramic views, signed by the photographer on the title page.

From September 23, 2001 to May 30, 2002, fine art photographer Meyerowitz descended into the devastation at the World Trade Center site, capturing images, shocking and stirring, of the Herculean effort to clean and reclaim Ground Zero. From iconic images conveying the scope of the destruction—the North Tower’s fallen and mangled antenna; the sprawl of the smoldering “Pile” that filled the towers’ “footprint”-to fleeting portraits of the aftermath’s human scale—a push broom resting against a concrete barrier; dust-covered toy ambulances in a desolate day care center—Meyerowitz reconnects his audience with the raw, often contradictory emotions that wrestled in America’s heart in the eight months after 9-11. His spare and reverent text preserves stories that illustrate a nation’s attempts to come to grips with its loss: the Broadway trumpeter who steals into the site to play “Taps”; the worker wounded by buried explosives in the Customs Building, who returns to work immediately after getting his stitches. Aftermath allows readers, in some small way, to share the arduous journey of “gardeners in the garden of the dead.” “Their grim task notwithstanding, the effect is uplifting… making it possible once again to imagine a future there” (New York Times). See Parr & Badger II:35.

A fine signed copy.