Most of the photos taken of the initial ground zero recovery were taken by one man--Joel Meyerowitz--starting on September 23, 2001 when he was granted access to be a photographer of record. Meyerowitz has published a number of the photos a stories from that time in a book , and all of his 5000 photos are now owned by the Museum of the City of New York , though I haven't found a place online where they are all accessible. I did find a presentation Meyerowitz gave to the New York Public Library about how he gained access to the site and, more importantly, what he saw and photographed there. A higher quality version of the NYPL presentation is preserved at C-SPAN One interesting note he makes about the ironworkers who disassembled the remains of the buildings, is that many of them had worked on erecting the buildings 35 years prior (at 28:15 in the above linked video).Another point he makes (at 45:03 in the above linked video) is to say that, to him, the most emblematic scene of the recovery was that of men and women raking through debris meticulously, either standing or on their hands and knees, and pouring it through screens, all in search of evidence of missing persons.Meyerowitz's book is only available in hardcopy form so it's difficult to find digital copies of the photos from it. As far as I can tell, his full archive hasn't been digitized and made available yet either.(By the way, some additional evidence that the WTC 1 core columns were not cut by thermite or attacked by explosive charges: a number of people survived the collapse of the building from inside stairwell b of WTC 1. The History Channel actually put together a documentary on them, which can be found on youtube in various places including here .)