If you are in the NYC area. Grand Central Station January 9 - 20, 2002 TIME presents "Faces of Ground Zero" January 9 - 19, 8:00AM - 10:00PM January 20, 8:00AM - 5:00PM A photographic tribute to America's heroes. by Joe McNally. Free admission The exhibit goes on the road after the 20th.

-- Alex Weiner (weiner@attglobal.net), January 07, 2002

Answers

Thanks for the alert, Alex. I will definitely check his show out.

-- Ted Kaufman (writercrmp@aol.com), January 07, 2002.

I just saw this show. It's pretty interesting. The portraits are awesome, but the polaroid prints seem a little thin or washed out. Less technical quality that I expected. But the content is amazing.

-- David G Hall (me@davidghall.com), January 11, 2002.

I just came back from this show. Very moving for the content and for the images as portraits, and I am glad to see it in a public space like Grand Central Terminal.

Technically, the 40x80" Polaroid format seems somewhat of a gimmick in this application. It's not well suited to portraits (DOF too short, hard to focus, visible diffraction, etc.). It also seems that the images were intentionally lit for low contrast to facilitate reproduction, which is an odd use of Polaroid as a medium. The contrast picks up beautifully in the printed poster, for instance, as it does in some of the versions that have appeared in magazines. If anything, it demonstrates that the law of diminishing returns takes effect somewhere past 20x24".

-- David Goldfarb (dgoldfarb@barnard.edu), January 11, 2002.