Upton Bell Collection at UMass Lowell Libraries

Gary Marlon Suson is an American photographer who is originally from the Illinois farming town of Barrington Hills, IL. He began studying and shooting photography at age 12. By age 17, Suson won the highest honor for any high school student in the USA, the Kodak Medallion as part of the National Scholastics Art & Writing Awards. He became friends with LeRoy Neiman and took pictures for his coffee table books, became known as an official celebrity photographer and shot editorial and fashion for 'Playboy Magazine' for 3 years. Suson's career took a sudden and jarring halt when terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001. Mr. Suson grabbed his camera and began documenting immediately. Suson began acting as a liaison for some of these men exposed to toxins on 9/11, via the FDNY Fire Union, arranging free environmental health care for them. This led to a chance encounter between Suson and FDNY Firefighter Rudy Sanfilippo, who was the Manhattan Trustee for New York City's Firefighter's Union. Sanfilippo, who had survived both collapses of the Twin Towers, inquired about Suson's photography and after seeing his memorial website, SeptemberEleven.net - invited Suson to fire union headquarters to have a "chat." That talk lead to Sanfilippo offering Suson one of the most coveted photographic positions of the last century - to be the Official Photographer at Ground Zero on behalf of the Uniformed Firefighter's Association. He had full, unrestricted 24/7 access to every single area of Ground Zero, including the subways deep below. Gary Marlon Suson shut down his lucrative photography business in November of 2001 and took on the position unsalaried, essentially "living" at Ground Zero for 7 months, 19 hours per day, 6 days per week. After receiving permission to publish these, Barnes & Noble Publishing produced this coffee table book, "REQUIEM: IMAGES OF GROUND ZERO."