You may know Joe McNally from his speedlight adventures on the Strobist, or teaching his methods for getting some great photo journalistic 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,Portraits of the Heroes of September 11th, 2001.
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 12ft wide x 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.

Here, you’ll see portraits of 150 of the men and women who came forward, and assisted in the rescue efforts.

As we approach the 10th anniversary of this tragic event, 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.

And if you are in New York, Nikon is sponsoring the exhibit Faces of Ground Zero: 10 years later August 24 – September 12, 2011
at the Time Warner Center, NYC with new images and video interviews.

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 are below:

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