The Eyes of Ground Zero

As New York City firefighters, police officers, and rescue workers searched through the September 11 wreckage in 2001, Joel Meyerowitz's instincts told him to grab his camera. Initially forced to halt his picture taking, he felt a pang. Says the 71-year-old shutterbug, “To me, no photographs meant no history."

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• Joel Meyerowitz
• World Trade Center
• War and Conflict
• Terrorism

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The award-winning photographer and two-time Guggenheim fellow discusses how his documentation of the 9/11 recovery efforts became a series of images titled "Aftermath: The World Trade Center Archive."

He’ll also dish about his life’s work. Well before his nine months as the only photographer granted access to Ground Zero, Meyerowitz brought color photography to the forefront in the ’70s. His seminal work, 1978's Cape Light, proved as artfully pertinent as black-and-white images at the time. More recently, he was commissioned to capture NYC's 29,000 acres of parks.