07 March 2002

Museum of London Photo Curator Calls Meyerowitz Exhibition Unique

London -- American photographer Joel Meyerowitz has brought something "quite unique" to the British public in his latest exhibition commemorating the infamous September 11 terrorist attack on New York City, says Mike Seaborne, curator of photos for the Museum of London.

Meyerowitz's show, called "After September 11: Images from Ground Zero," opened at the Museum of London on March 5. At a press preview earlier that day Seaborne, who has worked at the Museum for 23 years, told the Washington File, "I think he [Meyerowitz] has brought something quite unique that I've not seen in any of the other photographs of the event." The show will run at the Museum from March 6 to April 14.

Made up of 27 pictures drawn from around 5,000 Meyerowitz took following the attack on the twin World Trade Center towers in Manhattan that caused both buildings to collapse, killing almost 3,000 people, the show was managed and presented by the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (ECA). More than 25 copies of the show will make a worldwide tour over the next three years.

Commenting on the exhibition from a technical as well as artistic standpoint, Seaborne said: Meyerowitz "brings together this sort of street photography -- this kind of response to events that happened in the street -- with a kind of thoughtful landscape approach and its concern for form and light. He brings these two strands together in this work in a more invigorating way than I've ever seen before."

The New York artist has said he considers himself a street photographer in the tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson, although unlike the famous realist photographer, Meyerowitz works exclusively in color. Of the 12 books on photography the American has produced, his first book, "Cape Light," is considered a classic work of color photography and more than 100,000 copies have been sold since it first came out 20 years ago.

Seaborne said: "Color has a greater emotional charge because it has certain psychological meanings for us that go beyond the purely artistic. Black-and-white is more abstract -- but the world is not monochromatic. So, in photographs like this, color draws us into the human saga," its pain as well as its redemptive qualities.

"Meyerowitz is a master at this," Seaborne emphasized. An example in the collection he mentioned was one picture of Ground Zero that is almost monochromatic but shows two splashes of red -- flags planted to show where remains had been found in the rubble. "Color has been described as seductive, and it can be, but Meyerowitz has handled it with sensitivity and it adds to his pictures rather than subtracts," he said.

Of the exhibition's opening, which drew between 200 and 300 artists, journalists, and officials to the Museum of London, Seaborne said, "I think it went well. I especially heard a lot of comments about how well Joel spoke when he explained why he felt compelled to take the photographs and how Ground Zero became almost a spiritual place. Whatever the politics involved, Joel made it into a human story that everyone could identify with."

Meyerowitz said: "It is a privilege to work at Ground Zero. Everyone who works there has been transformed by the spirituality of the place. The camaraderie among the workers there has been transformed by the spirituality of the place. The camaraderie among the workers in the zone reminds me of the stories we've heard about the world wars, where men and women are thrown together by a common cause, share tragedies and victories, and are forever bound to one another by their effort."

On that score, Seaborne said, "My sense of talking to Americans who came to the show was that the link between September 11 and the Blitz [Nazi bombardment during World War II] means something to them." Next door to the Meyerowitz show, the museum has mounted an exhibition of photographs of the extensive bomb damage done to London at the start of World War II by the Nazi air campaign that ran from September 1940 to May 1941.

Arthur Cross, a former constable in the London police force, took the 30 black-and-white photographs, which vividly displayed the devastation Londoners had to cope with when Britain stood practically alone against the might of the Axis powers.

Seaborne said he saw two factors in common between the September attacks in New York and the London Blitz, which flattened a large part of the area around where the present 25-year-old museum is located. "Both attacks came from the air and at first were a great surprise, and city dwellers who thought they were far from the action were suddenly catapulted into the front lines."

Ambassador William S. Farish captured the frustration at watching the September 11 attacks from outside the country when he wrote recently in the Parliamentary House Magazine: "It was difficult for Americans overseas to watch the horrors from afar; it remains difficult for us to really know just how different everything is said to feel back home. But if we had to be away, we could choose no better place to be than here, among our friends in the United Kingdom."