Ground Zero exhibit honors New York's bravest

Claire Harvey, Contributor, Jakarta

They could be posing for a high school football team portrait. Eight beefy specimens of American manhood stand in proud, straight-backed rows with their arms crossed and their chins high. Some are grinning, others simply gaze frankly down the lens.

The backdrop gives it away. Behind The Men of the Arson and Explosion Squad, as this photograph is entitled, is a sickening mess of rubble and dust and crumpled, twisted steel. It is Ground Zero, the Manhattan site where the twin towers of the World Trade Center once zoomed to head-spinning heights in the New York sky.

Photographer Joel Meyerowitz spent the weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks at Ground Zero photographing the debris of thousands of lives, and the men and women who were trying to salvage something comprehensible from the destruction.

Meyerowitz's pictures, large rectangular images of astonishing sharpness and detail, are exhibited to mark the 50th anniversary of the Fulbright Program in Indonesia, which sponsors Indonesian students to travel to the US to further their education.

The photographs are fascinating in their depth and attention to detail. Tiny workers in overalls and gas masks scramble over massive piles of rubble and rock. Cranes collect great scoops of material and dump them in orderly piles, to be meticulously searched for any traces of human bodies or the accoutrements of daily life; watches, rings, identity cards, wallets.

A strange horizon seems to split many of the pictures. At the top of each frame is New York as we used to know it; a starry sky, glittering skyscrapers where each tiny window gives a miniature glimpse of the lamp-lit life inside.

At the bottom of each frame we see a completely alien landscape. A great dusty scrapheap is blindingly illuminated; flooded with giant flourescent lights so the searching can continue through the night.

There seems nothing at Ground Zero which is recognizable as the rubble of a collapsed office block. Nothing you might expect to see is there -- no crushed chairs or shattered filing cabinets or desks or even crushed cars or elevators. Instead, all we see is a grey porridge of gravel and metal, testimony to the massive force of the jets and the total destruction caused when the buildings subsequently collapsed. How on earth, the viewer wonders, do they identify anything - or anyone - in all this mess?

Primarily, this exhibition is a tribute to New York's Bravest and New York's Finest - the fire and police officers who died in the attacks, and their comrades who continue the search. Their voices echo through the exhibition room, as a continuously looping video plays footage of survivors speaking about the panic and mayhem of Sept. 11. Policeman Ray Suarez rushed back into the towers again and again to help people escape, his fellow officers tell us. When the buildings collapsed, he was still inside, Suarez's tearful widow Carmen says quietly.

The exhibition shows the positive side of Sept. 11, says Riley Sever, cultural affairs counselor at the US Embassy in Jakarta. "Its real focus is the resilience of the human spirit," Sever says. "This is not about death and destruction, it's about rising from the ashes."

The United States Department of State is sponsoring its embassies around the world to stage Images from Ground Zero over the next three years. It is part of the "strategic program of cultural activities" run by the Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. The bureau's role is to showcase American artists and promote respect for religious and cultural diversity around the world.

After Sept. 11, the bureau decided to help show the world America's grief by sending 10 "Jazz Ambassador" trios to tour predominantly Muslim countries around the world and by staging this exhibition.

Twenty-six sets of Meyerowitz's photographs were dispatched around the world, and exhibitions have already begun in cities as diverse as Nairobi, Panama, Dar Es Salaam, Manila and Tashkent.

A little local flavor might have helped in this exhibition. All the text and captions which accompany the photographs are in English, with no translations in Indonesian, and the video is not subtitled.

Meyerowitz, born in New York in 1938, captures even the most appalling scenes with a gentle touch. The subtle use of light for which he is famous makes Ground Zero a beautiful place, and he effectively portrays the cocky defiance of the rescue workers.

"We're fine," they seem to be telling the camera. "We're getting on with it."

The Stars and Stripes appears in most images, fluttering over the wreckage or stuck jauntily on a worker's helmet. The flag is a proper symbol of the nation's patriotic grief, but its constant repetition does give this collection a rather militaristic America-the-Vengeful tone.

Images from Ground Zero is, of course, a canny public- relations exercise but it is also an extremely moving exhibition, which pays tribute to the horror of Sept. 11 and the hopeful pride of a nation in mourning.

The After September 11: Images from Ground Zero exhibition runs until April 19 Galeri Cipta II, Taman Ismail Marzuki (TIM), Jl. Cikini, Central Jakarta.