Fall 2001, pg. 206. Ladder Company 3.

Maine Bar Journal

2001.

Fall 2001, pg. 206.

Ladder Company 3

Maine Bar Journal Fall 2001 Ladder Company 3 New York: some of the survivors

Lawyering is Jack Montgomery's livelihood, but portrait photography is his passion, and the distance between his office at Bernstein Shur Sawyer & Nelson in Portland and the rubble of the World Trade Center towers in New York could not be measured in miles. Reading that the New York Fire Department's Ladder Company 3 had lost twelve of its twenty-seven firefighters, he packed up his Hasselblad and his portfolio and left to meet the survivors.

On October 4, "I walked in and said 'Let me tell you what I can do with you,'" Montgomery recalls. He spread his portfolio out on the floor-photographs of Maine Holocaust survivors, photographs of Maine women coming of age, and many more that have been exhibited around his native state and beyond. "They said 'Good, let's do it,'" he says. "They were great subjects."

He saw grim sadness in their faces, the grief of men who had depended on other men to keep them safe, and who had lost those men to the insane atrocity that brought America to war, and the grief of men who knew that "Eighteen kids under the age of eighteen had lost their fathers."

Montgomery's purpose was not only to photograph the survivors, but to use their portraits to raise funds for those eighteen fatherless kids. He spent the next four days with the firefighters of Ladder Company 3, getting to know them, letting them...