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15 Years 911 – The Falling Man

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Today it is 15 years since 911.

Do you remember this photograph? In the United States, people have taken pains to banish it from the record of September 11, 2001. The story behind it, though, and the search for the man pictured in it, are our most intimate connection to the horror of that day.

If the number provided by USA Today is accurate, then between 7 and 8 percent of those who died in New York City on September 11, 2001, died by jumping out of the buildings; it means that if we consider only the North Tower, where the vast majority of jumpers came from, the ratio is more like one in six.

The New York Medical Examiner’s Office replies: “We don’t like to say they jumped. They didn’t jump. Nobody jumped. They were forced out, or blown out.”

Those tumbling through the air remained, by all accounts, eerily silent; those on the ground screamed. It was the sight of the jumpers that prompted Rudy Giuliani to say to his police commissioner, “We’re in uncharted waters now.” the Falling Man is falling through more than the blank blue sky. He is falling through the vast spaces of memory and picking up speed.

Richard Drew’s famous photograph lies. The Falling Man could be seen as a spike of human willpower, relaxed, comfortable, unintimidated. His humanity is in accord with the lines of the buildings, an embraced fate. In truth, however, the Falling Man fell with neither the precision of an arrow nor the grace of an Olympic diver. He fell like everyone else, like all the other jumpers—trying to hold on to the life he was leaving, which is to say that he fell desperately, inelegantly. In the rest of the sequence—the eleven outtakes—his humanity stands apart. He is not augmented by aesthetics; he is merely human.

The documentary of this Esquire story from 2003 is here.


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