Revisiting Ground Zero in ‘Aftermath'

Despite the cliché that "everything changed" after September 11, 2001, little difference can be found in most books, particularly novels, published since then. In what passes for literary fiction in the post-Ground Zero era, only the mildest flutters of fashionable anxiety over career plans and sexual peccadilloes threaten the complacency of uppermiddle-class characters — and their creators.

America in the 21st century has yet to produce its version of Dostoevsky's "Devils" or Conrad's "The Secret Agent." Instead, our creative community has mostly suffered a collective failure of imagination — or else surrendered to postmodern fantasy.

Hours after the attack on the World Trade Center, an acquaintance — an artist — said that the shower of paper and debris from the blazing Twin Towers looked like a gentle snowstorm. The destruction was somehow "beautiful," she said. She was fleeing her downtown loft, buried in soot and ash, just blocks away from Ground Zero.

In the face of so much denial and complacency, Joel Meyerowitz is a courageous chronicler of the truths that have been too great and hard and disturbing for most of his contemporaries. And his new work shows that the power of books is not confined to words. The book of the year is a collection of photographs.

Mr. Meyerowitz's heart-stopping "Aftermath"(Phaidon,349 pages,$75) is a 15.8 x 11.2 x 1.5-inch, 8.5-pound, full-color reminder of the grim reality of death, devastation, and war. From within the cordoned "forbidden city" of ruin at Ground Zero, Mr. Meyerowitz — granted exclusive official access — has captured for history a stunning series of images ranging from the mountains of smoldering wreckage in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, to the last fallen column, shrouded in the American flag as it was removed from the site nine months later.

In more than 8,000 pictures he took over that period, culled to a few hundred for what is still a massive book, Mr. Meyerowitz, an already acclaimed photographer, combined an artist's eye with a journalist's scrupulous concern for truth. Nothing escaped his lens: a stray shaft of morning light piercing the deadly dust that clouded the site for months; the cranes and backhoes looming like gape-jawed dinosaurs over the piles of debris; a chrome-plated stanchion incongruously erect next to a push broom that seems forlornly inadequate to the task of cleanup; the ghostly atrium of the Winter Garden, looking like the shell of an ancient coliseum; the bandage on the cheek of a welder, covering a wound suffered when his torch exploded while cutting through a thicket of rebar; the tragically eloquent signs hastily spray-painted on walls by rescue workers ("Triage," with an arrow indicating the direction; "Searched," a wrenching reminder of the human toll); empty cups, one still standing and one on its side, on a children's worktable in a daycare center; a parking meter, its column bent at an improbable angle, its face melted away.

And, on almost every page, two kinds of images haunt the viewer. First, scenes of horrific destruction, unimaginable beforehand and inescapable afterward: huge beams and columns of heavy iron twisted and mangled and flung about as though by an angry devil; giant slabs of concrete cracked and crumbled like stale cookies; fire and smoke and the pall of death everywhere. There is no escaping the ghastly fact that Ground Zero was the site not of a tragedy or natural disaster but of a war — that the smoking ruins were, more than anything else, a killing ground.

Second, and just as powerful as the devastation, are the faces of the firemen, policemen, sanitation and construction workers, engineers, volunteers, and all the others who cleared the mounds of iron and concrete and ash and made way for a memorial. They are men and women in hard hats and uniforms, and the sweat and grime from their agonizing labor is a humble rebuke to postmodernist irony and whimsy.

Begun as a clear-eyed chronicle of what was lost, "Aftermath" ends as a visual celebration of what remained: the indomitable spirit of people who, "day after day," as Mr. Meyerowitz writes in his introduction, "did what they could to set things right."