He and his friends - including New Yorker photographer Gilles Peress, photography instructor Charles Traub, and curator Alice Rose George - put out the word that they were accepting photos and looking for volunteers to work at the exhibit. When the show opened two weeks after Sept. 11, it had 60 images.
Chris Cawley, 34, an aspiring New York photographer who graduated from Southern Methodist University and worked in Dallas for 10 years, has been volunteering at the exhibit for weeks because, he said, "it's therapeutic."
"It's therapeutic for a lot of people," he said.
On the morning of Sept. 11, he was driving around looking for a parking place in Greenwich Village. He said he had "given up on corporate America" and was taking a photography course at Pratt Institute.
When he heard the first jetliner crash, he retrieved his equipment from his car trunk and began shooting pictures. In the days following, he concentrated on the heroes working around ground zero. Three of his images hang in the exhibit.
One shows New Yorkers greeting rescue workers with a hand-painted thank-you sign. Another shows a New York Daily News tabloid cover, anchored by two memorial candles, that read, erroneously as it turned out, "10,000 feared dead."
Mr. Cawley, who serves as director of sales and volunteers, said the exhibit has raised more than $900,000. By the time it closes on Dec. 24, it probably will have raised $1 million, he said.
Best sellers
The biggest sellers among the photographs include several versions of the towers before they were destroyed, one of firefighters raising an American flag over the rubble, and the image of a jagged cross created when windows were blown out of a nearby building.
Sam Myers, 35, another former Dallas resident, is among the 200 volunteers who have worked during the course of the three-month exhibit. A former stockbroker who grew up in Highland Park and graduated from Texas A&M, Mr. Myers also is studying photography. He feels he is helping people traumatized by the tragedy.
Some who come in, he said, were told by friends that they are in a picture. Others just want to talk about where they were and what their personal situation was on the day of the disaster.
One New Yorker, he said, bought 850 images at a cost of more than $22,000.
Vickie Dodd, a pharmaceutical company worker from Indianola, Miss., saw the exhibit while on a holiday trip with her sister. She bought 17 photos, costing almost $500. She said she didn't know what she would do with them; she was just moved to buy them.
Roberta Brown of Washington, D.C., said she has collected artwork from around the world. She described as "pieces of art" such images as a soot-covered tea set and the dusty statue of a man on a park bench with a laptop.