On the morning of Sept. 11, Jack Montgomery, a Portland lawyer, anxiously phoned his teen daughter, Molly, in Greenwich Village. It was just after 9 a.m. and Molly, a freshman in the first week of college, was still asleep. Take your cell phone and go outside, Montgomery told her. Molly stepped out onto the street, where a cloud of smoke was rising in the sky over the World Trade Center. “Oh my God, Dad, you won’t believe what I see,” she said. Father and daughter talked frequently during the next 90 minutes. When the first tower collapsed, Molly’s cell phone went dead.

Around the corner, the firefighters of Ladder Company 3 had already been on the job. They rushed to ground zero and 12 members of the battalion of 27, who included three marathon runners, raced up the stairs of the flaming World Trade Center. They were at the 44th floor when the structure was declared unstable by the senior officer on the ground. Get out, he ordered. The firefighters headed down. Four floors later, they encountered several dozen office workers halted by the fires and destruction around them. The firefighters refused to abandon the mission. They stayed with the people they had come to save. But crumbling walls were quickly encroaching. In the last transmission from inside the inferno, a firefighter said, “The building is coming down around us.”

Five hours later in Maine, Jack Montgomery heard Molly’s voice on the phone. She was safe. Shaken, but safe. Two days later, the winds in Manhattan shifted. The stench in the air was so overwhelming, Molly went to stay with friends outside the city.

Montgomery left Maine several days later to pick up Molly and take her back to school. One can only imagine the embrace between parent and child that day.

In the back of his car, Montgomery had loaded piles of food collected in Maine to donate to relief efforts in Manhattan. He dropped the items off at a food distribution center, but this act of generosity did not allay his sense of civic responsibility.

“I wanted to do something, but the only thing I know anything about is photography,” said Montgomery, who had walked late in the night from Union Square to Washington Square and witnessed poignant vigils and public mourning. “I didn’t want to leave New York.”

Montgomery did leave New York, but returned within a month and walked into the station house on East 13th Street, not far from ground zero. He spread the contents of his portfolio on the floor and explained his intention to make portraits of each of the firefighters and sell the prints to raise money for the families of the 12 men who died. “I expected to be shown to the door, but they said, ‘Come on in,'” Montgomery said.

What happened over the next five days – Oct. 3 through Oct. 8, which happened to be Molly’s 19th birthday – was a delicate encounter between lamentation and appreciation.

“It was a very nice thing that Jack did,” said FDNY battalion chief Richard Burban. “He was a very genuine person. He meant well and it came right from his heart.”

Montgomery’s portraits of the firemen and additional shots around New York City are the subject of two major shows running through the end of December at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport and the Portland Museum of Art. Both venues made major scheduling changes to present Montgomery’s work largely because all profits from donations and purchases of photos, which are on sale at Aucocisco Gallery in Portland, will go to the surviving families of Ladder Company 3. Members of the company, including Chief Burban, attended openings last week in both Rockport and Portland.

As a result of Montgomery’s efforts, Ladder Company 3/New York Fire Fighters Fund of Maine has been established. In addition to overseeing the allocations of the funds, currently totally $24,000, the group has accepted donations of scholarships to Maine summer camps for the 18 children left fatherless by the death toll at Company 3.

From his encounters with the 15 surviving men at Company 3, Montgomery’s appreciation for the work of firefighters has broadened. It’s not just that he now knows that firefighters can be laden with 100 pounds of equipment and that heart failure is the leading cause of death among them. It’s also that Montgomery understands the depth of commitment and camaraderie reflected in these men’s eyes, a pervasive quality in the large-format, black-and-white portraits taken in and around the firehouse. The eyes are intense, sad, determined. Or, as one young girl at the Portland Museum said as she stood in front of a firefighter’s portrait, “It looks like he’s been crying,”

“I understand that it’s a calling and not a profession,” said Montgomery, whose works are slated for exhibition at a Greenwich Village gallery in July 2002. “They are a society unto themselves with a very strict code of behavior when it comes to their work. They don’t have to ask, ‘What do I do?’ They know what they do. They are generous, giving people. Certainly, I’ve seen the virtuous side of human nature. In these people, I saw physical courage, sacrifice with no hopes or thought of personal reward, which is the purest form of heroism. Ladder 3 gave me a great gift by letting me in and letting me do this.”

Montgomery’s collection of photos was also an opportunity for Maine visual arts leaders to participate in a national dialogue between tragedy and creativity.

“The minute I heard about Jack’s project, I knew it was something we had to bring here,” said Bruce Brown, curator at The Center for Maine Contemporary Art. “I was really touched by Jack’s insistence and his moral obligation to do something. There are thousands of photographers in New York who would have done this and made powerful images. But for someone in Maine to get in his car and head down to New York – it was a very inspired gesture. Jack’s work really counts for something.”

Aprile Gallant, curator of prints, drawings and photographs at the Portland Museum, decided to feature the show, in part, because she was familiar with the power of Montgomery’s work, including “Soul Survivors: Legacy of the Holocaust.” That show, which was exhibited at the Bangor Public Library last year, also strove to localize a larger worldview by depicting Mainers who are Holocaust survivors.

“As institutions that represent the expression of history and culture, we know that Jack’s work is certainly something that interests us,” said Gallant. “It’s natural and fitting for a museum to show work that helps people make those connections.”

For the firefighters at Ladder 3, one of the oldest and smallest companies in New York, the show is part of an ongoing mission to take care of the families who lost their husbands, fathers, sons, uncles and nephews.

“It’s not so much what it means to us,” explained Chief Burban, who added that Ladder 3 is still in profound mourning. “It’s what it means to the lives of those who lost their families.”

“Ladder Company 3 FDNY: Photographic Portraits by Jack Montgomery” will be shown through Dec. 29 at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport and through Dec. 30 at the Portland Museum of Arts. For information, call 236-2875 in Rockport and 775-6148 in Portland. Montgomery’s photos are for sale at Aucocisco Gallery in Portland. For information, call 874-2060. The Web site for Ladder Company 3/New York Firefighters Fund of Maine is www.ladder3fund.org.