Endure: Renewal from Ground Zero, Limited Edition

"The book Endure- Renewal from ground zero.... is perhaps the finest of the books published in the immediate aftermath. Meditative, pained, highly visual with laconic captions, it coalesces the work of five photographers into the form of a photographic diary searching quietly for redeeming metaphors." - Fred Ritchin, Print Magazine, September/October 2002

Conveyed by Jurek Wajdowicz and featuring for the first time, now almost iconographic images by Carolina Salguero, Antonin Kratochvil, Alex Webb, Larry Towell and Gilles Peress, Endure was designed by Lisa LaRochelle and Jurek Wajdowicz in the first 6 weeks following 9/11 tragedy and organized ad hoc. This pro bono book was originally published and distributed by The Rockefeller Foundation throughout the New York City area to nonprofit organizations. For the last 18 months, this uniquely restrained but profound book has been embraced by photography collectors around the world and is now available for a limited time and in a very limited edition to the general market. All profits are earmarked for charitable organizations in the New York City area.

Non-exploitive, brilliantly contemplative in a poignant presentation, Endure - Renewal from ground zero has been internationally awarded for its thoughtful, noncommercial creative approach and concept by the world's most prestigious design juries such as American Communications Arts and British Design & Art Direction Show.

The following is an excerpt from a book review written by Eileen E. Ganter, Editor, Media Via.

"This unusual and thought-provoking book incorporates the work of five photographers: Antonin Kratochvil of VII, Gilles Peress, Larry Towell and Alex Webb of Magnum Photos, and Carolina Salguero of Sipa Press. Their documentation spans September 11 through October 21, 2001 and delivers a message that is so subtle its power is easy to underestimate. Its sense of consciousness, however, is keenly evident and grows upon contemplation.

While a number of other noteworthy photographic books provide seismic intensity with their images of fleeing faces, dust and debris, Endure views the tragedy much as a solar eclipse. To stare directly at the sun is to overwhelm the sense of sight. To render the unrenderable power of its force is to view it obliquely. To bear the unbearable is to contemplate it in the mirror of humanity: art.

'It was my deep desire to create an introspectively eloquent lament of the 'day after,'" says Wajdowicz. "I wanted Endure to be cohesive and poetic, as opposed to a more chopped and disjointed catalog effect. Endure should come across as movie-like--that is, a sequence-- with still life 'flashbacks' scattered throughout; a journey is how I envisioned it."

Thus Endure's images show the less dramatic, but no less profound shifting of foundations, as human beings find their footings in an unimaginably unsettling time. The focus-- the point-- is the resiliency of what lives within flesh and blood, and not what dies inside an icon of steel."