Out of the Ashes

This story at My Modern Met is neat because it tells how a woman, photgraphed in the aftermath of a World Trade Center tower collapse on September 11, 2001, found the street photographer who had snapped her image on that day.

Joanne Capestro was covered in the dust of her former workplace, having gotten outside the North Tower just a few minutes before it collapsed from the heat of the fire on the 87th floor. Phil Penman, documenting some of the impact of that fall on the areas of lower Manhattan closest to it, took her picture. Several years later, when Penman's work was displayed in the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, a museum staffer recognized her and was able to get her in touch with Penman.

This past August, Capestro married her fiance and she asked Penman to be the wedding photographer.

There is within the human being a drive of some kind to bring forth goodness from wrong -- a fellow in my line of work might think of it as a feature of the imago Dei, and as a matter of fact I do. This one's a little thing, not much measured against the awfulness of that day. And yet that awfulness still can't crush it down, as small as it is.

Worth thinking about, I hope.