Description
Life-sized Polaroid photograph taken by Joe McNally depicting Red Cross volunteer Melissa van Wijk. Melissa is wearing her Red Cross Disaster Services jacket and has her site credentials and a respirator hanging around her neck. Clear goggles sit atop her head and a walkie-talkie is hooked to her jeans. A pink teddy bear with a child's drawing on a card sits are her feet.

Historical Notes
Melissa van Wijk, a youthful-looking choreographer and dancer, confronts the camera wearing a signature Red Cross jacket, various site credentials, and bright yellow boots. Prompted by McNally’s suggestion that people bring with them to his studio any relevant, portable equipment, she sports a walkie-talkie radio at her side, a respirator draped from her neck, and protective safety glasses pushed above her forehead. Propped between her boots is a pink teddy bear. The bear displays a hand-made “Hero” message, integrated into an American flag motif. Van Wijk explained her Red Cross assignment as “working at aid areas that distributed food and offered showers and beds to workers.” In further response to McNally’s questions, she recalled spending 20 continuous hours on site during that first day at Ground Zero before breaking for a nap and returning to her post immediately thereafter. “That’s what everybody did. It was chaotic. Everything that didn’t fit into someone else’s job fell to us.”  

Born and raised in The Netherlands, Melissa van Wijk attended Dansacademie Brabant and performed with the Elisabeth Dancers and Dans Studio Gerda Zaandam. She relocated to New York to pursue a master’s degree in dance education at New York University, later enrolling as a doctoral student in dance education at Columbia University’s Teacher’s College. She went on to teach dance at New York City public schools in all five boroughs and contributed to New York City Ballet’s Young Audiences program. In 2014, she founded and served as Director of “Born Dancing,” a nonprofit studio program offering training and positive performance experiences for disabled and special needs dancers.

Curator's Comment
In the weeks after September 11, LIFE Magazine photographer Joe McNally (b. 1952) invited rescuers, recovery workers, survivors, and bereaved family members to a studio in Manhattan’s Bowery district, not far from Ground Zero. Here, the participants were memorialized by a unique Polaroid camera—dubbed the Moby C—equipped with a lens from a U-2 spy plane. This room-sized instrument could capture an exposure of singular clarity on an eight-foot tall piece of film in the blackened studio. Each 90-second session required meticulous staging and absolute stillness. Whereas most photographers were concentrating on documenting the devastation of the attacks downtown, McNally was interested in recording the heroism and sorrow etched into the human faces at the center of this national tragedy. Those who faced the camera were mostly everyday people who sought no special recognition. “They came only with the intention of participating in a project, telling their story, and sharing in the telling of others,” McNally reflected.     
 
The 9/11 Memorial Museum has enjoyed a long relationship with McNally's images. In 2006, McNally donated his portrait of FDNY Ladder 20 firefighter Adrienne Walsh to support the Museum’s nascent permanent collection. When the outdoor Memorial opened to the public in 2011, a selection from the series was borrowed from the photographer and rotated onto view in the temporary Visitor Center at 90 West Street. Annual acquisitions from the Faces of Ground Zero archive have continued, often as gifts arranged by McNally. In 2017, the Museum assumed custody of the remaining Polaroids in an agreement that will result in the collection’s completed donation by 2027.

The image in this record is the product of a color transparency from a Mamiya RZ 6x7 Pro II 120 format camera that McNally positioned to record a shot simultaneous with the Polaroid Moby C’s flash of light. The unique, original Polaroid exhibits a more subtle and creamier tonality.
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