Lower Manhattan, looking west, the ground itself has become a quarry of what stood here. Meyerowitz photographs the site after the towers, and the place announces itself first as a vast field of grey rubble—splintered beams, twisted plate, dust banked like dirty snow—out of which rise, at the right, the surviving lattice columns, charred and bent, a row of black ribs against a sky the colour of scorched amber. Orange excavators crouch in the wreckage like patient animals; a tall crane lifts its line over the smoke; and far off, the intact office blocks watch, their windows catching a smoldering sun.
The light is what unsettles me. It is beautiful, frankly beautiful, gold pouring through the haze from the west and gilding the ruin, and I do not know what to do with a beauty laid over so much loss. Meyerowitz does not soften the debris—every jagged edge is held in sharp grey detail—but he lets the hour drench it, so that the dust glows and the machines throw long shadows toward me. The eye accepts the splendour before the mind names the disaster; the photograph makes me complicit in looking.
And then a detail fixes me and will not release: one slim figure in the middle distance, a worker dwarfed almost to a smudge beside the orange machine, standing where a city's worth of stone has come down. He gives the scale its terrible measure. Everything around him is anonymous matter, but he is a man, alive, at the centre of the pile, and his smallness tells me how high the towers were by telling me how low they now lie. I came to the photograph for the spectacle of the ruin and stayed for him, the single living thing the wreckage cannot quite swallow.
Lower Manhattan, looking west, the ground itself has become a quarry of what stood here. Meyerowitz photographs the site after the towers, and the place announces itself first as a vast field of grey rubble—splintered beams, twisted plate, dust banked like dirty snow—out of which rise, at the right, the surviving lattice columns, charred and bent, a row of black ribs against a sky the colour of scorched amber. Orange excavators crouch in the wreckage like patient animals; a tall crane lifts its line over the smoke; and far off, the intact office blocks watch, their windows catching a smoldering sun.
The light is what unsettles me. It is beautiful, frankly beautiful, gold pouring through the haze from the west and gilding the ruin, and I do not know what to do with a beauty laid over so much loss. Meyerowitz does not soften the debris—every jagged edge is held in sharp grey detail—but he lets the hour drench it, so that the dust glows and the machines throw long shadows toward me. The eye accepts the splendour before the mind names the disaster; the photograph makes me complicit in looking.
And then a detail fixes me and will not release: one slim figure in the middle distance, a worker dwarfed almost to a smudge beside the orange machine, standing where a city's worth of stone has come down. He gives the scale its terrible measure. Everything around him is anonymous matter, but he is a man, alive, at the centre of the pile, and his smallness tells me how high the towers were by telling me how low they now lie. I came to the photograph for the spectacle of the ruin and stayed for him, the single living thing the wreckage cannot quite swallow.