Joel Meyerowitz's Ground Zero Photographs Go on Display in Fort Lauderdale for 9/11's 25th Anniversary

Photographer Joel Meyerowitz was on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, when the 11 September 2001 attacks happened. His wife told him to turn on the television. What he saw sent him toward Manhattan the moment travel restrictions lifted — but what got him there with a camera was something else entirely. He learned that then-New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani had banned photography at Ground Zero, the site of the collapsed World Trade Center towers. So he went. The Art Newspaper

"It was a calling," Meyerowitz, now 88, told The Art Newspaper in an interview published on 8 September 2026. He spent the next nine months photographing the cleanup — the rescue, recovery, demolition and excavation at the site — becoming the only photographer to gain unrestricted access to Ground Zero, according to his own biography. The result was "Aftermath," a body of work that became an official historical document and led him to represent the United States internationally.

The US Department of State sent the photographs to more than 200 cities across 60 countries, including a showing at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2002. A book, "Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive," was published in a 2011 edition marking the tenth anniversary of the attacks.

Now, 28 photographs from the series are on display at the NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale in Florida, commemorating the 25th anniversary of 9/11. The museum's director and chief curator, Bonnie Clearwater, decided to mount the exhibition after Meyerowitz donated the works following a 2024–25 retrospective of his career at the same institution. The museum's own exhibition page describes the photographs as documenting Ground Zero's transformation over nine months — from total devastation to cleared bedrock.

Meyerowitz, who helped legitimise colour photography as a serious artistic medium, took a meditative stance toward the site and the people working in it. Rather than chase spectacle, he methodically recorded the labour of clearing the wreckage. The photographs are large-scale and quiet, focused on workers, wreckage and the slow, mechanical business of removal.

The exhibition opened on 13 July 2026 with a preview event on 30 August, and runs through 14 February 2027. The museum is also hosting a free "Remembering September 11" event on 11 September 2026, featuring the exhibition.

What makes the story unusual is the path from a banned activity to an official archive. Giuliani's prohibition on photography at Ground Zero pushed Meyerowitz to act. He talked his way in, stayed for nine months, and the images he made were then deployed by the US government as a diplomatic and cultural document — a turnaround from "no photographs allowed" to "these photographs represent the country."

The NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale is also currently hosting a documentation exhibition of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's "Surrounded Islands," which opened in February 2025 and runs through spring 2027.