You may know Joe McNally from his speedlight adventures on the Strobist, or teaching his methods for getting some great photojournalistic shots.
Quite honestly, our first encounter with Mr. McNally’s work was an exhibit at the Skirball Museum in Los Angeles of his massive over life sized, Polaroid portraits of the Faces of Ground Zero.
In the face of tragedy, we all react and contribute in different ways.
Joe McNally’s reaction was to photograph the heroes of the event and make sure we all remembered.
The people in the photographs never intended to be heroes but the situation called upon them, and they answered the call.
The studio was set up with this camera that took larger than life photographs, and the people who had come to the tragic site to help, came to the studio. The camera measured 12 long by 16ft high, and produced these one of a kind Polaroid images

At a time when many books were revealing the destruction of 9/11, and were brilliantly done, such as Joel Meyerwitz’s book, Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive, this book took a different path, a positive look at the best of the human condition.

Portraits of 150 of the men and women who came forward, and assisted in the rescue efforts.

So although the date isn’t here yet, we wanted to offer a copy of this out of print book, to one of you.
Why this book is currently not in print, puzzles us, but no matter. We can still find a copy here and there.

The next time you hear about Joe McNally, and he is teaching all of the best ways to use speedlights, also remember this volume of work he made.
We always will.

Details on getting a copy of this book will be in this weeks NEWSLETTER.
Sign up by Tuesday night @12:00 EST.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 16th, 2009 at 9:20 pm and is filed under Photo News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.