http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/nyregion/images-of-ground-zero-transformed-by-sandys-waters.html 2016-09-12 14:24:21 Images of Ground Zero, Transformed by Sandy’s Waters Michael Redpath, a lieutenant in the Fire Department, spent six months documenting the cleanup at the World Trade Center site after the Sept. 11 attacks. Then a hurricane found his negatives. === Michael Redpath had just started surfing near his home in Breezy Point, on the Rockaway Peninsula, when he looked up and saw smoke billowing up from Lower Manhattan. That was the end of his surfing that day, 15 years ago. A lieutenant in the Fire Department now, he was a firefighter in Ladder Company 169 then. By the time he got to the World Trade Center, both towers were down, and the area looked “like a nuclear winter,” he said, with “totally empty streets, white dust covering everything.” The next day he learned how many of his compatriots died. Lieutenant Redpath, 53, is also a photographer, with a degree in fine arts and a minor in photography. He took a few pictures that day, and took more over the next six months, documenting the cleanup operation. He did not show them to many people. The images here are products of two disasters: one natural, one wholly not. Lieutenant Redpath kept his negatives from ground zero in his basement art studio. When But disaster has its own sense of beauty, always humbling. The salt water transformed the wreckage of the World Trade Center into landscapes from another planet, as if nature were reclaiming dominion over that unnatural event. Some of the photographs are being exhibited at the “There might be some firemen who don’t think it’s a good idea to show them,” Lieutenant Redpath said. “It was a horrible thing that happened. I don’t want to flaunt anything, but I do want people to remember what happened. A lot of people in New York now weren’t here, or they were little children. Young adults now were 5 years old through the whole thing.”