NEW YORK—To coincide with the fifth anniversary of 9/11, Phaidon Press has just published Aftermath, a monumental volume of 400 photographs taken at the World Trade Center site in the days and months immediately after the terrorist attacks. The images were made by Joel Meyerowitz, the only art photographer to have access to Ground Zero during clean-up efforts.

Meyerowitz was able to obtain a worker’s badge, thanks to a personal connection he had with the Manhattan Borough commissioner for parks and recreation. But even with this semi-official permission, he had to play a cat-and-mouse game with police officers and others who didn’t want anyone photographing the site. Meyerowitz and his camera were there, however, for the entire eight-and-a-half-month undertaking, and he took some 8,000 photos.

Prior to the Aftermath project, Meyerowitz’s considerable reputation was founded upon his work as an early advocate of color photography, his work as a street photographer and his 15 books of photography. He is currently engaged in a long-term project to document the lesser-known parks of New York City.

Joel, how did the experience of working at Ground Zero change you as an artist?

The single most remarkable change in my life is that I have been awakened and politicized as a citizen. I feel that it is our responsibility—my responsibility—to speak out when the cause requires it, when the motivation is strong. As I get older, I feel that that’s what my cause is as a photographer.

The way it changed me as an artist is that it has made me more open to doing things that have public usefulness attached to them. It’s not what we always think about art doing. Art isn’t always useful. Now I try every year to do something that can go toward the public good. It doesn’t mean that I’m exclusively doing that, but it does mean that I’m trying to stay open and receptive to that.

I have to say that the best thing for me, in personal terms, was that I found a kind of passion for my work that I don’t remember unless I think back to when I began shooting in the ’60s, and I couldn’t wait to get out on the street every day. At Ground Zero I felt as though I had rediscovered the reason for photography. When I got up in the morning I was burning—I couldn’t wait to get down there. It didn’t matter how tired I was, I just thought to myself, “I’m going!”

I had the passion of the young photographer from 40 years before, and that is something that every artist who gets older hopes to possess again at some point in their life. The penalty of being in any game for a long time is that you get sophisticated. You’re more academic in the sense that your argument is with your medium or yourself—it becomes incredibly self-indulgent, and this was a way for me to blow away that self-indulgence and do something for somebody else, and just figure out the method as I went. What a gift that was!

What motivated you to make these pictures in the first place?

Because people were shut out of Ground Zero after the first two days. They didn’t know what was occurring inside, or who was working for them. They couldn’t see pictures, just like we don’t see body bags and coffins and the wounded coming back from Iraq. So we have no sense of the emotional cost. I felt that I was in there as the “resident eye” who was looking at all of this and hoping to make the document that would give it back to the people. I’ve been true to that since the beginning.

I took it upon myself to do this as a gift, as a way of helping. Because that’s what motivated me in the beginning: I felt helpless and paralyzed, and as if there was nothing I could do. I felt this yearning. I’m sure that everyone in New York had some kind of a desire to help, and people gave money or made sandwiches or gave blood.

I have a sense that, five years on, people have more of an appetite for trying to contemplate what 9/11 means to them.

I agree with you. By the fifth anniversary, lives have changed, and 9/11 is beginning to recede historically. So we literally have perspective over five years. I was hoping that my book would be a useful tool for people to study, or to engage in, so that they could both see what it was like inside Ground Zero and have a chance to really grieve over the losses in a way that was palpable.