March 17th, 2006
That Day
I watched an interesting program about 9/11 last night on Channel 4 called The Falling Man.
There is the potential for beauty in most things, even in death and suffering, a notion that a lot of people are not comfortable with (understandably). I can’t help the way I see the world, I can understand some aspects of it, people want to grieve, they remember their loved ones as they were not how they died. Yet I tend to find that the taboo over death can be somewhat silly at times. But then everyone handles it differently.
Picture by Richard Drew
Yes I think Richard Drew’s image is a wonderful shot, not just for composition and form but mainly because of the story it tells, the moment in time it captured. Some of the most amazing photo’s I have seen are really quite unpleasant, ranging from Vietnam to Concentration Camps of World War 2. These are not images set up, the lighting checked and what not, these were caught on the fly, true fragments in time.
Richard’s image was posted in a newspaper for one day, it caused such outrage that it wasn’t seen again. Instead media favored the hardworking people trying to save folks lives and what not. I can understand this, in such situation you want people to be strong, to have hope human triumph over such situations can instill strength and pride in a person. But that is just one section of the story, The Falling Man was another section that got over looked.
A researcher whilst trying to find the identity of the figure in the image spoke with a coroner who said something on the lines of;
“Oh no one jumped, they were blown out of the window, we don’t say they jumped.”
Now that guy in the photo took his life in his hands and made a choice of how he wanted to die. I know I would rather jump than be burnt. I found the comment of the coroner to insensitive, it mocked the man’s choice to end things on his term it mocked his life by pushing him aside, all because people cannot seem to handle death.
As I mentioned to Tom during the program and which they came to the conclusion later in the documentary it wasn’t the man in the image that told the story of what happened, it was the image itself as a whole. The man in the image told another story, that of the man himself.