Joel Meyerowitz and Robert Frank

Mark Feeney was kind enough to pass on an anecdote from photographer Joel Meyerowitz that didn't make today's piece in the Globe. Read the story, of course, so you can understand why he was the only photographer credentialed to work on ground zero.

In his interview, Meyerowitz talked of how he came to be a photographer. At the time, he was a young advertising executive in New York in the early '60s. He went to a photo shoot and felt overwhelmed as he watched the photographer at work. His name? Some guy named Robert Frank.

Robert Frank, "Funeral."

Would Meyerowitz have become a photographer had he not seen Frank at work that day.

"Probably not. He inspired me to think about time. I had no understanding of the photographic moment. I thought photography was copying things that you told to stand still. Turn your head. Change the light. Blip went the flash. It seemed very dull and uninteresting to me. It was all about product, whether it was a person or a piece of clothing or something on a tabletop. But Robert was such a spirit _ and he kept making the invisible visible. Over his shoulder, I could see, every time I heard the click of the Leica, I could see the moment gather itself. And those little gatherings were so signficant. In their brief visibility they seemed to get bigger. As I walked back to the office, up Fifth Avenue, all along the way all I could see were these seizures: click, click, click. I felt mad, absolutely crazed.

"Wow, when I got to that office. I was ready. I was gone.

"It just pushed me out the door, and I had no idea what was waiting for me except I KNEW I had to seize the time. It was, without doubt, why I went on the street [as a photographer]. And I had no photographic education whatsoever."

Joel Meyerowitz