Bryan Hong

I returned to NYC from my house on Cape Cod less than a week after 9/11. The first thing I did when I got home was race downtown to see the fallen towers. Many of you know this story, but when I got there and raised my camera to my eyes, a police officer approached me, whapped me on my arm, and said, "No photos. It's a crime scene." I realized then that we'd have no historical record of this horrific event if pictures weren't allowed. I had studied a few historical archives at the Library of Congress in D.C., and I knew I had to be the one to create an archive of this seminal moment in my city's - our global - history. Over the next 9 months, I returned to Ground Zero, a.k.a, The Pile, daily (with a few travel exceptions), to photograph the wreckage, light, architecture, and the incredible group of people who were there to excavate, clean up, rake for remains, and help in any way possible. It was a community of remarkable people - a brother and sisterhood - of ironworkers, NYPD, FDNY, Captains, Chaplains, security workers, and politicians. I snuck in daily to photograph and got kicked out daily. It wasn't until I quite literally stumbled into a group of men from the Arson and Explosion Squad, who asked what an older guy like me with a big old camera was doing down there, that I found my way in without fear of being evicted. They all quickly believed in the importance of the photographic record I was attempting to make. They gave me their phone numbers and said to call them if I had any trouble, and they'd bring me back to the site. Eventually, I got an official mayoral badge that granted me easier access to the Pile. In the end, I made over 8,500 pictures. My focus was never on human remains. I wanted to capture the place, the light, the people. I owe so much of this experience and access to my band of brothers from the Arson and Explosion Squad. Here is merely a tiny selection of some of the pictures. Many can be seen, however, at the Museum of the City of N.Y., World Trade Center Memorial Museum, Smithsonian Museum of American History, Library of Congress, and about 500 in my book, Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive. 1. A Worker in a Raking Field searching for human remains, 2002