Above: New York City, Sept. 7th, 2001 WTC.12 by Joel Meyerowitz

I had a chance to see Joel Meyerowitz speak at the George Eastman House this past week. He’s as good a storyteller as he is a photographer – you can hear his humble wonder at the subtleties of life as he recounted the development of his project Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive. Featuring over 8,000 images, it’s a staggering tome, and one that Meyerowitz said was inspired by a need for documenting history, something that he feared was not being adequately done (or done at all) by the government agencies on site. And – of course – Meyerowitz went to the site to collect stories, not simply evidence. The warmth of his experiences with workers, police officers and others at the site was genuinely moving.

As I am sure many in the room were, I was transported back to my own personal experience of 9/11, and my memories of that day were jostled by something Meyerowitz said. Referring to the image above, Meyerowitz talked about our concepts of permanence. He’d shot this image a few days prior to the 11th, and remarked that he felt the sky and the light weren’t particlarly impressive that day. But he wasn’t dissapointed; he just thought he’d come back the next week and make more images.

I can recall in the days following 9/11 taking a walk down Market Street in Seattle towards the Puget Sound and seeing the jagged outline of the Olympic Mountain range. The mountains had always been beautiful, but on that day I was thankful that they were permanent in a way I hadn’t considered. Yes, those peaks may vanish in some great cataclysm (or by the slow erosion of a few millenia), but nothing could take them away in an instant. I personaly spend a lot of time asking myself what good pictures serve, but Meyerowitz stoked within me a passion to make more, despite their shortcomings. On that day, maybe I should have taken a picture of that mountain range. Instead, I have this story. Either way works, I suppose.