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American Morning
America Recovers: Interview of Award-winning Photographer Joe McNally
Aired November 05, 2001 - 09:47 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Images from the World Trade Center site will stay with us forever.
Award-winning photographer Joe McNally took many of those pictures. He shot this cover for "LIFE" magazine: two symbols of America, a firefighter and the nation's flag. Joe McNally drops by to talk about the photos he took, using an almost-one-of-its-kind Polaroid camera.
Welcome, good to see you.
JOE MCNALLY, PHOTOGRAPHER: Good to see you.
ZAHN: Before we look at more of these stunning portraits, describe to people what the size of camera is, because it's absolutely extraordinary.
MCNALLY: It's a one-of-a-kind photographic operation. It was invested by Dr. Land, who the founder of Polaroid, back in the mid- '70s. Dr. Land being a brilliant man and also not without ego, he went to his engineers and said let's make one as big as we think we can possibly can make it, and this camera is the reality. It's a full-size room. People work inside the camera.
ZAHN: To give people perspective, is this you standing next to these portraits? The portraits come out as Polaroids in what side?
MCNALLY: They are about 42 inches by 105 inches. They're life size. It's a one-to-one reproduction lens. What you pull out of the camera is a positive image that's has no negative, can't be reproduced -- it's a one-of-a-kind.
ZAHN: Who are these firefighters that you took portraits of?
MCNALLY: We shot almost 100 firefighters. All of them have astonishing stories of their days in the aftermath of the WTC explosion. This is Josephine Harris here; she's the Guardian Angel of Ladder Six, down in Chinatown. Six firefighters stayed with her. They knew she was slowing them down in getting out of the building, but here pace of descent ended up perfect. They ended up in a third- floor stairwell that stayed intact; all of them survived. People above them and below them did not. ZAHN: You also took pictures of Lisa Beamer. People today stand in reverence of what her husband attempted to do on that flight where the plane was brought down in Pittsburgh in what appeared to be a thwarted hijacking here. She was five months pregnant there.
MCNALLY: Yes, she's an astonishing woman. She's absolutely fearless. She has become an icon herself, I think, just in terms of the way she has reacted to this and handled it. I was very proud to have made her picture. She came to the studio and stood for three separate portraits.
ZAHN: She did. She's very comfortable, is she not, representing this call for a return to normalcy and almost -- I don't want to call it open defiance, but almost a soft defiance, over the day she took the flight crosscountry to San Francisco: She's out there telling everybody, don't be afraid, I'm getting on this plane.
How did you pick these portrait subjects?
MCNALLY: Like any project in journalism, there's a bit of a plan, but there's also a bit of serendipity. We called fire and police commissioners' offices. We got permission from them. Local firehouses started to show up. In terms of the firefighter core and the police core, there's a grapevine, and people started talking about the project. Before you knew it, we had entire ladder trucks showing up. Emergency service unit truck rolled down the block. The mayor came.
ZAHN: Did you take his picture?
MCNALLY: Absolutely. Absolutely. In fact, we shot two life- size Polaroids of Mayor Giuliani. He's a bit of a camera buff, so he really was fascinated by the process.
ZAHN: Will all of these pictures appear in an exhibition?
MCNALLY: That's what we pushing for. We are pushing for Grand Central Station at the turn of the year.
ZAHN: Because you need a huge venue to show off the scale of these photos.
MCNALLY: Absolutely. That was the heart of the idea, to photograph people in a way you would really meet them. So when you put these up and walk up to these prints, it's like the person is in the room with you. So if you could imagine an exhibit that had 100 to 150 of these images, it would have real power, I think.
ZAHN: Congratulations. The images are extraordinary.
MCNALLY: If I may say, I can't take credit for that cover of "LIFE" magazine. That's not my photograph; that's another photographer's.
But the Polaroid project is something we did, and it's part of this book that is out today. And also a larger section of these pictures will appear in a hard cover that come out later this month.
ZAHN: We will look forward to that.
Good of a fellow journalist to give his colleague some credit.
MCNALLY: Absolutely.
ZAHN: Thanks, Joe.
MCNALLY: Thank you very much.
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