REMEMBERING
One of the most famous images of that terrible day in New York in 2001 is almost never published in the US today, writes
Why there are some images history can’t forget
In the picture, he departs from the earth like an arrow. Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it. If he were not falling, he might very well be flying. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. He appears comfortable in the grip of unimaginable motion. He does not appear intimidated by gravity’s divine suction or by what awaits him. His arms are by his side, only slightly outriggered. His left leg is bent at the knee, almost casually. His white shirt, or jacket, or frock, is billowing free of his black pants.
His black high-tops are still on his feet.”
This is the opening paragraph of an article by Tom Junod that was published in 2003, and republished on Tuesday on various platforms to mark 17 years since the September 11 2001 attacks in New York and on the Pentagon. It remains one of the best articles I’ve read on the subject, focussing as it does on a single horrific moment caught in a frame as a kind of stand-in for the whole, a “visual synecdoche” for the event, if you will, jarring in its intimacy, but even more so in its geometry, symmetry and absurdity.
The picture was taken by Associated Press photo-journalist Richard Drew, who also famously captured a picture of Bobby Kennedy’s “open and ebbing” eyes just after he was shot in 1968 at the Ambassador
Hotel in Los Angeles. Drew was 21 years old at the time.
Drew’s photograph of the man falling to his death from the North Tower appeared in publications all over the world. Junod writes: “Some people who look at the pictures see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation; others see something else — something discordant and therefore terrible: freedom.”
The photograph was captured when Drew, alerted to the events going on that day, took an empty train to the place where people were “crowding the edge of the cliff formed by a dying building”. In Drew’s account, when he arrived on the scene, “people on the ground were gasping because people in the building were jumping”.
He started shooting pictures, finding a falling body and following it down for a nine-to-12- shot sequence, when he heard people shouting “There goes another!”
Junod wrote: “It was, at last, the sight of the jumpers that provided the corrective to those who insisted on saying that what they were witnessing was ‘like a movie’, for this was an ending as unimaginable as it was unbearable: Americans responding to the worst terrorist attack in the history of the world with acts of heroism, with acts of sacrifice, with acts of generosity, with acts of martyrdom, and, by terrible necessity, with one prolonged act of — if these words can be applied to mass murder — mass suicide.”
The photograph appeared in the New York Times the day after the tragedy and in countless other papers around the country. It came to be known as “The Falling Man”. But since then Americans have gone to some lengths, according to Junod, to remove it from public consumption.
“In most American newspapers,” writes Junod, “the photograph that Richard Drew took of the Falling Man ran once and never again. Papers all over the country ... were forced to defend themselves against charges that they exploited a man’s death, stripped him of his dignity, invaded his privacy, turned tragedy into leering pornography.”
The argument was that the person in the picture was identifiable to his family and that it would make their inconsolable grief even more impossible to bear. With this in mind, Junod reports, the editor of the Toronto Globe and Mail assigned a reporter named Peter Cheney to discover who the man was.
There have been various theories about the identity of the man, which have both tormented and frustrated family members of the person it could have been.
Mostly the image hasn’t been seen in print since 2001. Drew has called it “the most famous photograph no-one has seen”.
Seventeen years after the horrific event perhaps the world is ready to put the photograph in the annals of history, along with Kevin Carter’s “Starving Child and Vulture” (a child near a feeding centre in South Sudan, eyed by a scavenger), Nick
Ut’s “The Terror of War” (a little Vietnamese girl running naked after a napalm attack), and Therese Frare’s “The Face of Aids” (32year-old aids victim David Kirby on his deathbed surrounded by his family), along with countless others. They are pictures that make the terrors of history visual to us while at the same time humanising the events and allowing us to empathise with the victims in the photographs, no matter how different our backgrounds and beliefs may be.
These award-winning pictures, some of which also depict a moment close to death, are, however, different from “The Falling Man”. In Drew’s photograph there is only the man and the stark verticals of the building. As visual literacy student Sam Scott puts it, there is no “white noise”. There are only two people in the picture, the man and the viewer, which immediately and uncontrollably prompts us to ask that uncomfortable question: “Would I jump too?” ● LS
‘IT WAS AN ENDING AS UNIMAGINABLE AS IT WAS UNBEARABLE’
THERE ARE ONLY TWO PEOPLE IN THE PICTURE: THE MAN AND THE VIEWER