Some emails stop you cold in the middle of a working day. Frank Meo’s was one of them. Twenty-five years after September 11, 2001, the man who has spent thirty years championing photographers is bringing together thirty-six of them, the ones who were there, cameras in hand, that day and in the days that followed, for six evenings where they will finally tell what was behind the lens.
PROJECTIONS: 25 Years Since 9/11, Before History Was Written It Was Photographed will run from September 6 to 11, 2026, live every evening at 7 p.m. (New York time), via Zoom, broadcast worldwide. The program follows the chronology of that day and its immediate aftermath, building toward the anniversary itself. This is not another retrospective. It is a quarter century collapsing into a single conversation, between men and women who watched their images become something else entirely: the visual memory of a world tipping over.
Frank Meo, the man who gets photographers talking
I only knew Frank Meo by name before this email, a name that has circulated for years in New York’s photography circles. A Brooklyn guy through and through, he moved from advertising into representing photographers, then mentoring, then curating, and has now spent more than thirty years at it. What he built with ThePhotoCloser and PROJECTIONS is nothing like a well stocked contact list. It’s a real community, born from a monthly gathering where three photographers would each take a short half hour to walk an audience of New York creatives through a project. When the event went fully virtual during the pandemic, it took on a different quality, more intimate, oddly enough, despite the screen. Frank has this reputation in the industry for opening doors and expecting nothing in return. He often tells the story of landing photojournalist Lori Grinker a major Citibank commercial campaign, while she was quietly waiting on a call from Doctors Without Borders. When he handed her the fee, close to 98,000 dollars, she started crying and told him it changed her life. That might be the real signature of PROJECTIONS: less a showcase than an act of giving something forward.
Thirty-six witnesses, one collective memory
The list of presenters is dizzying. Joel Meyerowitz, who for a long time was the only photographer authorized to document Ground Zero. Steve McCurry. Pete Souza and David Hume Kennerly, two presidential photographers who watched the crisis unfold from inside the White House. Ron Haviv, Peter Turnley, David Turnley, names I’ve run into for years in conflict photojournalism. Spencer Platt and Thomas Franklin, whose images essentially defined the iconography of 9/11 for entire generations. Eric Draper, Stan Honda, MaryAnne Golon, Ruth Fremson, David Friend, Mark Edward Harris, Jennifer S. Altman, and the list keeps going, with Pulitzer and World Press Photo winners, editors, and representatives from the AP, TIME, The Washington Post, Getty Images. These aren’t guests paraded out for appearances. These are the people who, that day, had to decide in a split second what the world would see, and who, twenty five years later, are finally willing to talk about what happened off frame.
What PROJECTIONS has drawn for years
What stands out, once you dig a little, is how consistent the whole thing has been. PROJECTIONS wasn’t built for this anniversary. The event is nearly eight years old and has already brought more than four hundred photographers in front of a loyal worldwide audience. Under lighter formats, it has hosted names like Donna Ferrato, David Burnett, Deanne Fitzmaurice, and Nancy Borowick over the seasons, without ever losing that warm, almost family like feel among creatives. During the war in Ukraine, Frank Meo devoted several consecutive weeks to full evenings with war photojournalists, Pulitzer winners included, proving the format can carry the emotional weight of the heaviest subjects just as easily as the lightness of a portfolio talk. Every session is filmed and archived on the PROJECTIONS YouTube channel, which over the years has turned it into a living library anyone can still browse today.
For this special 9/11 edition, the ambition changes scale without changing spirit. It’s still that open table between photographers and audience, but with a stake in memory that reaches well beyond the usual New York photography crowd. Six evenings, thirty six perspectives, a quarter century of hindsight, and Frank Meo’s conviction, unshaken, that before history was written, it was photographed.
PROJECTIONS: 25 Years Since 9/11, September 6 to 11, 2026, 7 p.m. EST, live on Zoom. Program and registration at projectionsnyc.com.
Grégory Herpe
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