Given the record flood of images that in their diverse ways reflect the events of 9/11, there are those who doubt whether any single image is able to stand out from the others through its power to capture the essence of what happened. As one author put it two years after the event: “the enormous swell of image production generated by 9/11 and conflicting ideologies precluded the possibility of any single example holding the field.”Footnote 1 Looking back, with the benefit of a longer perspective, it seems that a handful of images, in the minds of a larger public, have gained an iconic power that other images lack.
Why is it that some photographs have a power of epic concentration, condensing larger moments in history into one iconic image? The quest for an answer may lead us to reflect on the way the human mind stores arresting moments. Psychologists in their use of the metaphor of “flashbulb memories” suggest an analogy between pictures in the mind – photographs taken by the human eye – and the medium of photography. The power of iconic photographs derives precisely from our feeling that such photographs have done the work of memory for us. They have an impact on the human mind similar to that our eyes would have had, had we been present. They produce the equivalent of “flashbulb memories” for us, turning us into vicarious witnesses, irrespective of distance and time. The effect critically has to do with what one student of the medium has called “the savage silence of photographs.”Footnote 2 They speak no words, use no rhetorical flourish, no linguistic embellishments or evasions. They are literally before language. They freeze transient motion into lasting stillness. Neither film nor television footage has this power of silence. Stopping time and motion, photography “forcibly fills up our view.”Footnote 3 Photographs come to us like documents from “the other side,” beyond time, beyond life. They are like testaments, last wills drawn up in the service of memory.Footnote 4
The power of photography, thus conceived, is intrinsic to the medium. It does not critically depend on artistry or aesthetics, on an inner vision in the mind of the photographer seeking expression. Iconic photographs, freezing history into memory by making time stand still, have an autonomy of expressive force unconnected to authorial intent or control. This all-perceptiveness of photography, seeing things that would escape the human eye, caused Walter Benjamin to speak of the “unconscious optics” of the medium.Footnote 5 The afterlife of iconic photographs is most clearly the area where the photography of history blends into the history of photography. From this perspective photographs most clearly take their place as agents of history, rather than being its mere reflection. From the moment that photographs acquire iconic status and enter the realm of the mass circulation of images, they begin to affect history rather than merely reflecting it.
Here the closer reading of one particular photograph – Falling Man by Richard Drew – may suggest an approach to exploring this power of iconic images. The picture is of a man falling from one of the towers, captured at the fleeting moment when his body seemed to assume the stylized pose of an Olympic diver. As we shall see, the photograph has never been secure in its claim on iconic status. It was contested, even rejected, yet it has managed to endure in an afterlife as the inspiration for some of the finest and most interesting creative responses to the drama and trauma of 9/11.
It is this picture, for example, that provided Don DeLillo with the title for his novel on the tragedy of 9/11. Or in fact more than just the title: the falling man is a haunting presence in the story itself. Drawing on the rich resonance of the falling man as a remembered iconic image, DeLillo, in an inspired distancing strategy, introduces not the person so unforgettably caught in mid-fall by Drew's camera, but the enigmatic character of a performance artist, David Janiak, who specializes in reenacting not the fall, but the photographic still; Janiak reenacts the pose of the iconic falling man, hanging upside down above the pavement, secured to a harness. In DeLillo's words, “There was something awful about the stylized pose, body and limbs, his signature stroke. But the worst of it was the stillness itself.”Footnote 6 Only much later in the novel is the connection between the photograph and the reenactment made explicit. Upon reading an obituary of David Janiak in the newspaper, dead at thirty-nine, apparently of natural causes, the woman protagonist of the novel does an advanced computer search and reads about a dispute over the issue of the posture Janiak assumed during the fall, the posture he maintained in his suspended state. Was this position intended, she reads, to reflect the body posture of a particular man who was photographed falling from the North Tower of the World Trade Center, head first, arms at his sides, one leg bent, a man set forever in free fall against the looming background of the column panels in the tower?
She did not read further but knew at once which photograph the account referred to. It hit her hard when she first saw it, the day after, in the newspaper … Headlong, free fall, she thought, and this picture burned a hole in her mind and heart, dear God, he was a falling angel and his beauty was horrific.Footnote 7
Thus, almost in passing, DeLillo evokes the afterlife of a single photograph, with its iconic power to burn holes in the minds and hearts of so many.
Falling people, Falling Man
At the time of the attack on New York's Twin Towers many sat in front of their television screens, trying to imagine in anguish and impotence what was going on in the towering inferno of the World Trade Center. Yet one response among those trapped in the buildings above the level of impact was clear for all to see. Rather than burn or choke to death people in their hundreds had opted for a death of their own choosing, delivering themselves to the pull of gravity as they jumped from windows on all four sides of the towers. Television images showed many of these individuals until the various channels covering the events stopped broadcasting them. The images were deemed too gruesome, too unmediated a confrontation with the horror of the moment. If the point here was the protection of the public, it may also have been the intention to protect the dignity of the jumpers from the unseemly, if not voyeuristic, intrusion into their utter loneliness, seconds away from death. Although the “jumpers” epitomized most starkly the horror and tragedy of the event, images of their free fall were safely tucked away from the public gaze, preventing their becoming part of a collective memory that would soon be cast in terms of the heroism and bravery of the victims and their saviors. Yet the mental shock and trauma of those who beheld the spectacle of so many people falling, and who will never forget the loud thud of bodies hitting the ground – “it was raining bodies,” as one firefighter wailed in shock once he was safely back at his stationFootnote 8 – does seem to need its own closure through sharing the memory with others.
What is it exactly about images of these individuals falling to their deaths that elicits public reticence? Is it the gulf between the jumpers' experience lasting some thirty seconds and that of a larger public, yearning perhaps to empathize yet prevented from empathy in the case of the falling people? Is it so hard to read a meaning into their fate?
The rich store of photographs and of film and television footage has allowed makers of historical documentaries to return to the images of falling people and carefully contextualize them. Ric Burns, for example, structures his documentary New York: The Center of the World as a biblical passion,Footnote 9 telling a story that makes it clear to the viewer that the horror of the terrorist onslaught has made for the collective redemption of New Yorkers. Good in the end emerged from evil. Burns has not shrunk for fear of being disrespectful to the dead by showing footage of people leaning out of the upper floors of the two towers, clinging to windowpanes first, then choosing a free fall to certain death. The camera pans from body after body falling down to the stunned faces of the crowd. “My God, Oh, my God,” is the continuing litany one hears. There is one voice, though, addressing the cameraman – one must assume – shouting, “You can't take pictures of this.” That voice must have spoken on behalf of all those whose gut feeling was one of revulsion against filming this particular aspect of the horror of the World Trade Center attacks.
That feeling must have prevailed in the days following 9/11. The history of Associated Press photographer Richard Drew's photograph testifies to this urge to suppress. Drew had trained his telephoto lens on one man and shot eight frames. Back in his office at the Associated Press, he inserted the disc from his digital camera into his laptop and recognized, instantly, what his camera had seen with its uncanny power to catch, in Benjamin's expression, the “unconscious optics” of human perception. A moment no observer's eye could have consciously noticed was forever frozen in a frame. In a split-second moment all the visual ingredients that went into the picture had, as if in a kaleidoscope, assumed a transient configuration that seemed to suggest a transcendent reading. Drew did not even look at any of the other pictures in the sequence. He didn't have to. “You learn in photo editing to look for the frame,” he says. “You have to recognize it. That picture just jumped off the screen because of its verticality and symmetry.”Footnote 10 The next morning the photograph appeared on page 7 of the New York Times and in a number of other newspapers across the country. Yet, as Richard Drew remembers it, “Most newspapers refused to print it. Those who did, on the day after the World Trade Center attacks, received hundreds of letters of complaint. The photograph was denounced as coldblooded, ghoulish and sadistic. Then it vanished.”Footnote 11
Drew had photographed dying before. As a twenty-one-year-old rookie photographer on a supposedly routine assignment, he was standing behind Robert F. Kennedy when he was assassinated. He was so close that Kennedy's blood spattered onto his jacket. He kept taking photographs, even when a distressed Ethel Kennedy tried to fend off Drew and his intrusive camera eye. Nobody at the time refused to print those photographs. They became iconic images and established Drew's fame. What, then, is it about Drew's image of the falling man that people initially found so offensive?
As Tom Junod describes the photograph in a piece for Esquire magazine, it differs from all other photographs of people falling from the Twin Towers. All the other images show people who appear to be struggling against horrific discrepancies of scale. (The iconic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Falling_Man.jpg) Falling Man image is one of a series of photographs taken by Richard Drew, who recently reflected on the experience (http://news.yahoo.com/photographer-behind-9-11-falling-man-retraces-steps-recalls-unknown-soldier.html), of people jumping from the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001.) They are made puny by the backdrop of the towers, which loom like colossi, and then by the event itself. They flail, twist, and turn; their shoes fly off. There is no semblance of control. The man in Drew's iconic picture, by contrast, is perfectly vertical, head down, seemingly poised and in full control of his posture. The image shows him in perfect accord with the lines of the buildings behind him. He splits them, bisects them. Everything to the left of him in the picture is the North Tower; everything to the right, the South Tower. Junod goes on to say, movingly and perceptively,
Though oblivious to the geometric balance he has achieved, he is the essential element in the creation of a new flag, a banner composed entirely of steel bars shining in the sun. Some people who look at the picture see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation; others see something else – something discordant and therefore terrible: freedom.Footnote 12
The man does not appear intimidated by gravity's lethal force; rather he seems to defy it. His arms are by his sides. His left leg is bent at the knee, almost casually. He offers the ultimate image of grace in the face of death. Yet only seconds before or after, like the others who had jumped, he had flailed, twisted, and turned. No human eye could have caught this moment of transcendence and stillness, a moment frozen forever. The power of this one image, so richly suggestive of redemptory readings, is quintessentially photographic.
To those who are willing to set aside their sense of disrespectful intrusion, this detached reading of the photograph suggests all the elements that make for an iconic photograph. In its suggestion of grandeur and grace, in its intertextual evocation of Jasper Johns's many variations on the theme of the American flag, in the “savage silence” of a man stopped in mid-fall forever, it would appear to offer, in epic concentration, an emblem of grandeur and humility that would far transcend the sound and fury of 9/11. It would seem to make it the perfect American icon for Americans at a time of national sorrow.
But there are those who may never summon such Olympian detachment or see the redemptive power of the picture of the falling man, leaving the picture to speak for itself. There have been attempts at establishing the identity of the man in the photograph.Footnote 13 Different trails led to potential relatives and may give us a clue to the diverse ways in which people interpret the act of jumping to a death of one's own choosing. One trail led to a Catholic immigrant family from Latin America, the Hernandezes, another to a woman from Connecticut. The Hernandez family, when confronted with the photograph, refused to accept that the photograph might show their husband and father, who had been a restaurant worker at the top floor of the World Trade Center. As they saw it, he would never have jumped. They looked at the decision to jump as a betrayal of love, an unconscionable suicide that went against everything their Catholic faith taught them. The woman in Connecticut had lost two sons in the terrorist attack, both working on the equity desk of an investment firm in the Twin Towers. From a Protestant background, she looked at the decision to jump as a loss of hope – as an absence that we, the living, now have to live with. She chose to live with it, not by angrily rejecting the picture, but by confronting it, by trying to know – by making an act of private witness. Yet a third trail led to the family of an African American preacher from Mount Vernon, New York. The man in the picture may have been Jonathan Briley, the preacher's son. The strong Baptist worldview of the family seems to have inspired them to see the falling man in a different light. As his sister Gwendolyn ruminated,
I never thought of the falling man as Jonathan, I thought of him as a man that just took his life in his hands for just a second. Did that person have so much faith that he knew God would catch him or was he afraid to experience the end up there? I hope we're not trying to figure out who he is and more to figure out who we are through watching it.Footnote 14
These are words that perfectly capture the redemptive reading of Drew's iconic photograph. They suggest more strongly than I have done that the lasting suspension of the falling man may be seen as an act of God, rather than as a quirk of photography.
These responses may suggest a more general clue to the widely varied ways in which Americans and others have coped with images of people jumping to their deaths from the Twin Towers. I know of no research data to confirm the following speculation. Yet, on the Internet, long lists can be found of statements by individuals, paying homage to whoever they think the jumper may have been, Norberto Hernandez or Jonathan Briley.Footnote 15 The attempts at identifying the lone jumper in Drew's picture may serve many people to cope with the enormity of so many unidentified, anonymous persons choosing to jump and fall to their deaths. It may help them to sympathize and extend the redemptive quality in Drew's image to all these single desperate acts. A more general issue to be raised here, though, is that the effort at identifying the falling man misses the point of the picture's iconicity. (In the case of the Napalm Girl in Nick Ut's iconic Vietnam photograph, the fact that her identity is now known has not detracted from the power of the image.) Drew's Falling Man will live on, I am sure, as the photographic equivalent of the Unknown Soldier, as a photographic lieu de mémoire inviting reflections on the history of 9/11 and its meanings.
The likelihood of the image definitely attaining such full iconic status, of its finding its place in the continued quest for the meaning of 9/11, may be confirmed by the history of its afterlife. It has already inspired creative work by other artists. Don DeLillo took his creative cue from this specific photograph, not from the generalized imagery of jumpers. (It is easy to miss this point and not pay due respect to individual photographs. For example, Jonathan Safran Foer's 9/11 novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, for its final flip-through pages, uses a photograph by Lyle Owerko, not, as is often stated, Drew's image.Footnote 16)
Struggling to come up with the proper language, the proper metaphors, for understanding what the collapse of the Twin Towers may have signified, those reflecting on the meaning of Ground Zero may well come to construct their narratives around the central metaphor of the fall, in all its rich, intertextual, resonance. In a perceptive essay, Devin Zuber, like Walter Benjamin's Paris flâneur transposed to New York, reflects on the changed reading of one of the largest and most unknown public sculptures in lower Manhattan, several blocks north of the World Trade Center, Roy Shifrin's Icarus. The sculpture depicts Icarus at the very end of the Greek legend. The torso is headless and wingless, tilted at such an angle as to suggest not Icarus' winged ascension, his hubris before the fall, but the fall itself. The sculpture was positioned in such a way that the form was perfectly juxtaposed against the looming bulk of the Trade Center towers. At night one had the perspective of the statue falling down the dark space between the two towers. Only now can the sculpture assume its full mythological power as an emblem of human hubris “before the fall.”Footnote 17
If the statue can be seen to prefigure 9/11, then Art Spiegelman, in his In the Shadow of No Towers, after the fact creatively reconfigures the imagery and meaning of falling from the sky.Footnote 18 Once again using the medium of the comic book, or graphic novel, that he had used before in Maus as a distancing ploy to describe the formation of his “postmemory” of the Holocaust,Footnote 19 Spiegelman now tries to control the traumatic impact of the events of 9/11. Plate 6 of In the Shadow of No Towers shows on the left-hand side a full-length image of the tower in the last moments before its collapse. A man is seen jumping from it, preferring the freedom of the sky above death by fire, fantasizing, as the text has it, about “a graceful Olympic dive as his last living act.” The author then adds these amazing words: he is “haunted now by the images he didn't witness.” What turned him into a secondary witness of 9/11, what formed his postmemory of the events, was not stories told to him, as in the case of Maus, but may well have been Drew's image of what truly was a graceful Olympic dive.Footnote 20 Thus, in his own creative way, Spiegelman too illustrates the way in which a person's repertoire of memories may have been formed while undergoing the force of Drew's iconic photograph.
In conclusion, let me emphasize that what is important is not the making of a final selection of just one ultimate iconic representation of 9/11 in a single image. There are those to whose minds 9/11 as a day of infamy will bring remembered images of towers ablaze, of people running for safety, of two monuments of the New York skyline collapsing. They are all, in their own right, images of 9/11 as spectacle, leaving the spectator in the role of impotent, outside observer. My focus has been on those harrowing pictures of victims, of people jumping from the towers toward a death of their own choosing. They are pictures that make for painful empathy with their fate. And this is why they will continue to resonate in the public memory. Within that body of photographs of falling people, my point has been to account for the impact that one image in particular, Drew's Falling Man, has had on so many viewers. My purpose has been to account for the fascination of that one image, in a struggle to find words to describe that impact. To that end I looked at how others – the photographer himself, Tom Junod, Don DeLillo, Art Spiegelman – have translated their fascination into language that may help us account for the way this image continues to haunt us.
I too felt an immediate fascination with the Falling Man photograph by Richard Drew that is the subject of Rob Kroes's thoughtful essay. After it disappeared from the newspapers, I sought it (and eventually found it) on the Internet, where I could study the shocking image, taken with a telephoto lens, of a man plummeting head first to earth. It had the remote quality of something seen in the grainy distance, and not in sharp focus; and it brought to a sudden exclamation point the myriad images of 9/11, letting one ponder for a moment the experience of falling from a building – and of doing so as an irrevocable choice. What was it like? Was the individual even conscious at that point? And what had preceded that moment of decision? We know what the circumstances were, but even so, how does one make a choice of that nature? All of these things were evoked by the Falling Man, which has over the years captured the imagination of a range of artists whom Kroes discusses in his essay.
Kroes claims that the Falling Man has attained iconic standing in relation to the World Trade Center disaster, a process that he describes in terms of the literary responses to the image. I want to make three points in responding to Kroes's essay. First, I want to argue that the image functions less as an icon than as an existential symbol; second, I want to propose that the visual representation of 9/11 is of historical importance not because of any one iconic image but because of the panoply of images associated with the event. And third, I want to suggest that the process by which we understand any photographic image is somewhat different from what Kroes represents.
What does it mean for an image to become iconic? Conferring iconic status on Falling Man would give the image a central political meaning in the events of 9/11, turning it into a kind of synecdoche, a representation and summing up of the whole of 9/11, just as, for example, Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother sums up the Great Depression. Yet compared to other iconic images, Falling Man is somewhat different, both more and less than images such as Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima by Joe Rosenthal, for example, which became an immediate symbol of World War II, an overnight sensation sent round the world by the wire services. Other images from other wars likewise became instantly recognized as almost ritual images: Eddie Adams's photograph of Nguyen Ngoc Loan raising his arm and firing a pistol shot into the head of Vietcong operative Nguyen Van Lem; Nick Ut's photograph of a young girl running naked toward the camera after a naplam attack; the Abu Ghraib prisoner standing hooded atop a cardboard box, with arms extended and wires attached to his hands. In each case, the photographer captured a moment of action – an event – that seemed at once a revelation and a summation of the war. Falling Man, like these others, carried an immediate charge of emotion, but unlike the others it was not immediately disseminated and hailed. Indeed, it was censored by the news media, who removed it from circulation after the first exposure in newspapers. In doing so, the editors were, we assume, responding to popular revulsion against the image: it was too much, too awful, over the top; and Kroes quotes photographer Drew's own explanation: “The photograph was denounced as coldblooded, ghoulish and sadistic. Then it vanished.”
Given this initial reaction, who is to say that the image has now become iconic? True, it has become the subject of a number of creative works that have responded to the sensational and existential moment embodied in the image, yet the image as it has been ruminated upon is less a political symbol than an existential one. Has Falling Man achieved the universal status and agreed significance of the other unimpeachably iconic images mentioned earlier? I think not, and I would argue that the very thing that makes the image so attractive to artists and intellectuals – the wilful plunge to imminent death as the ultimate existential symbol – is what makes it troubling to the mass viewer.
Falling Man is unique in its embodiment of a profoundly existential moment, but there are surely other images that come to mind in association with 9/11, images that have achieved, one might say, a generic iconicity, so that virtually anyone on earth would immediately recognize the historical provenance of the image: people running, covered in ashes, from the destroyed towers; the second airplane penetrating the second tower; the Twin Towers in flames, seen from below; the stark metallic ruins of the World Trade Center, photographed from nearby windows, or standing alone in the night light; the firefighters sitting exhausted during the course of their horrendous day; the smoking Twin Towers as seen from Brooklyn, or from New Jersey; objects left on the street in memory of lost ones. The fact that all these other images readily come to our minds, I would say, suggests the unique nature of the 9/11 disaster from the perspective of photographic history.
Unlike the Civil War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, this was an event that was witnessed by millions of people firsthand and by millions of others over live television. And virtually everyone who witnessed it firsthand in New York City, or so it seems, had some kind of visual recording device – camera, cellphone, video. Consequently, we have more pictures of the events of 9/11, taken more or less simultaneously, than has ever been the case for a single event in previous human history. (Why not state it boldly?)
In the weeks following 9/11, and recognizing the plethora of images, two documentarians – Michael Shulan and Gilles Peress – solicited images from amateurs and professionals alike, and they exhibited the thousands of images submitted in a Greenwich Village storefront exhibition that attracted a steady stream of visitors, lining up outside. (The exhibition was subsequently mounted in a website and then appeared in a densely illustrated photographic book, Here Is New York: A Democracy of Photographs.Footnote 1) The images were shown, both in gallery and in book, without title and without the name of the creator, as if to place all photographers – professional or amateur – at the same level, in a gesture that acknowledged the universal shared response, the “democratic” response to the event, and in order to develop “a new way of looking at and thinking about history,” as Shulan put it in introducing the photographs. As I have argued elsewhere, Here Is New York constitutes in itself a historically important event, a new kind of mass response to an event of such proportions.Footnote 2
There is no historical necessity governing the establishment of an iconic photographic image, and it may be that the importance of 9/11, in terms of visual culture, is that in this instance we have a vast body of work that has come to take the place of any single iconic image.
But I don't want to abandon Kroes's argument before I've had a chance to respond to it on its own terms. So let me grant the premise for a moment and ask, along with Kroes, why do some photographs have a “power of epic concentration?” Kroes's response is interesting because, as I read it, in attempting to answer this question he offers two competing responses. First, he identifies the power of the iconic photograph as purely visual (“They are literally before language”), creating “an impact on the human mind similar to that our eyes would have had, had we been present.” But as the essay develops, Kroes considers the impact of the image on writers like Tom Junod, Art Spiegelman, and Don DeLillo, concluding that how they “have translated their fascination into language … may help us account for the way this image continues to haunt us.” Thus, on the one hand, the image seems to have a magic of its own, independent of any mediation, an autonomy that resides somehow in its transparency. But, on the other hand, its power seems best comprehended through the work of artists, who have meditated on its power and thus mediate the image for us.
The conundrum of photographic meaning that Kroes enacts in his essay testifies above all to the ambiguous and elusive quality of photographs. We think the medium has a transparency, a literal quality, which renders images simply windows on the world – what our eyes would have seen, had we been present. Yet that transparency is always an illusion, mediated both by the formal character of the image and by the verbal context in which the image is presented. Consider first the difference between human vision and camera vision. When we are present at events, we are not, after all, functioning as cameras; we are in the flow of experience, and in the actual experience of such events we may recall a blur of images, or a few that stand out in some diffuse way in our memories. We seldom, if ever, “capture” in our minds the instantaneous image that a camera can render. Cameras differ from human vision in these two respects: the camera stops the instant in a frozen frame, and it does so by recording a scene in its entirety, background and foreground. That is why – and here I agree with Kroes – photographs can function as artificial memories, taking a place in our minds that is the equivalent of a “real” memory; what we “remember” can be not what we witnessed but what we see in the photograph of the event.Footnote 3
But the particular nature of the Falling Man image, and of any iconic image, is worth noting further in this context. Unlike natural vision (what our eyes would have seen, had we been present) camera vision is quite different in being framed and selective. What made the Falling Man image stand out for photographer Drew as he looked at the images he had taken that day, what made the image stand out for the many viewers who have responded to it, is the particular composition of the figure and ground – the fact that the figure, assuming an elegant pose that is the accident of the frozen moment, is pictured at the center of the image and at the very edge of a vertical line that divides the picture into two equal parts, the two different backgrounds (the two sides of the tower) for the falling figure. In short, the composition of the picture is striking, almost abstract. (We could say the same for Ut's Napalm Girl, General Loan's assassination, Iwo Jima, and Abu Ghraib.) Something pictorially is striking the viewer – the framing, the balance, the composition – that is making the picture work. All of which is very different from natural vision.
The other point I want to examine more briefly is how images, iconic or otherwise, gain their meaning for us. It is not only their composition, as just suggested, that can endow them with particular significance; it is also the verbal context that explains and frames the image and which furnishes the historical matrix of its meaning, often accompanying the image into the world. Where Kroes affirms that photographs exist “before language,” I would say instead (and shifting the emphasis significantly) that all pictures exist in an incipient relationship with language. What we articulate, or what has been articulated for us, becomes the meaning of the image. In the case of Falling Man, we have an image whose meaning has in fact grown over time, beginning with Tom Junod's journalistic investigation into the identity of the subject (which appeared in Esquire) and more recently in the work of DeLillo and Spiegelman, among others. Kroes examines these works, in accounting for the meaning of Falling Man, but I think it's important to observe that it's not a singular meaning that these various authors are ascribing to the image. To the contrary, it's a set of meanings, arrived at through the fictive imagination or through the history of graphic cartoon art, or through journalistic investigation, that has been artfully associated with, or imposed upon, the original photograph.
We can surely agree that Falling Man is one of the richest symbolic images of the twenty-first century. But I'm not sure we can agree that it is the iconic image of 9/11 or that its meaning is singular and fixed, as is usually the case with iconic images. And that is because the meaning of 9/11 is itself not singular and fixed. Rather, it is best represented, I would argue, by the multitude of images that were made on that day and that have been archived most powerfully in Here Is New York, an archive that has attempted to embody the destruction of the World Trade Center in the richness of its photographic representation by thousands of witnesses to the event.
The first thing worth noting about Rob Kroes's contemplation of Richard Drew's photograph Falling Man is that the more Kroes tries to talk about the photograph, the more he talks about other things, including its entrance into the “realm of the mass circulation of images” and the ways it begins “to affect history rather than merely reflecting it.” Those effects extend to reportage, to feature journalism, to television documentaries, to fiction, and to a graphic novel. The photo refers us to the “mental shock and trauma of those who beheld the spectacle of so many people falling,” to the look on their faces, appalled as much by the fact that the jumpers were being photographed as by the sight of the plummeting subjects; it invokes connections with or reinterpretations of other works of art, such as Jasper Johns's variations on American flags or Roy Shifrin's sculpture Icarus, another falling man located “several blocks north of the World Trade Center.”
The first person affected by the photo was photographer Drew himself, discovering when he viewed the shot on his laptop that his digital camera had produced an image his eye could not have. Perhaps that is why another aftereffect of the photo was the unsuccessful attempt to identify the man photographed, as well as the diverse reactions of those who might possibly be relatives of the unidentified man. Their responses, Kroes posits, “may suggest a more general clue to the widely varied ways in which Americans and others have coped with images of people jumping to deaths from the twin towers.” Indeed, Kroes appropriately concludes his analysis by suggesting that it is how others “have translated their fascination into language that may help us account for the way this image continues to haunt us.”
But translation into language is what we all do, whether as critics or as general human subjects whose imagination is delimited by the symbolic order. What seems particularly compelling and problematic about applying this process of translation to Falling Man, I think, is that the photo presents an image too real to be translated and yet so unreal that it seems to arrive already labeled. Although it is just a snapshot, it looks like a symbol – a flag, to use one of Kroes's examples. It suggests a kinship with Magritte's Ceci n'est pas une pipe, or it resembles a piece of Dada art, such as the Duschamps's intentionally vulgar L.H.O.O.Q., the title of and label on a reproduction of Mona Lisa defiled by a hand-drawn moustache and goatee. But Dada, according to Tristan Tzara, must abolish all logic. If its manifesto requires, in his words, that “we spit on humanity … We must sweep everything away and sweep clean,”Footnote 1 it is not hard to be haunted by a sense of revulsion at the idea of associating Falling Man with Dada.
But if we are thus haunted, it is not by the picture's composition per se, but by the history that informs it. Falling Man's specter forces a head-on collision between photographic and historical representation.
What finally does the photograph of a man represent, with his back straight and one knee bent, head pointed directly down, framed somewhere between the roof and the pavement by the two (no longer extant) Twin Towers? We do not even know what story his descent had reached when he was caught by the camera, but the apparent stillness, the ostensible poise, the look of stoic calm, arrest the imagination of most viewers in two ways. In one sense, it captures that imagination, demanding that all its faculties attend to the image's contemplation. In a very Foucauldian sense, faced with the photo, we are arrested by the mechanisms of surveillance that we have internalized. But also, the imagination is blocked, arrested in the sense that it is incapable of exercising transformative powers, incapable of returning the picture to historical time, incapable of disciplining its meaning.
If the man is falling for what seems an eternity, was that not for him what it actually was? The sister of Jonathan Briley (one possible identity for Falling Man) views the photo as a test of faith for those who look at it:
Did that person have so much faith that he knew God would catch him or was he afraid to experience the end up there? I hope we're not trying to figure out who he is and more to figure out who we are through watching it.
When Kroes tells us that her words may suggest “that the lasting suspension of the falling man may be seen as an act of God,” the ambiguity of the phrase “act of God” summons another version of the clash between history and art, temporal and eternal, evoked by Kroes's observations about attempts to translate the image into words. In our imperfect idiom, “act of God” can refer either to an event possessed of divine purpose or to a catastrophe in a world devoid of rational causes.
This helps us understand the photo's troubled history. Few papers would publish the photo, and those that did experienced outrage that required pulling the shot from circulation, before its gradually resurfacing “in an afterlife,” as Kroes puts it, “as the inspiration for some of the finest and most interesting creative responses to the drama and trauma of 9/11.” In that it has an “afterlife,” the troubled history of Falling Man may differ profoundly from the troubling history of the actual man who was falling, a history he entered when he leaped from the window – which window? – of a tower – which tower? – of the World Trade Center. Actually, his troubling history started when terrorists used box cutters to take control of four commercial airplanes; or rather, it actually started years earlier when plans were conceived to use commercial airplanes to destroy monumental American sites and suicide agents were recruited and trained to execute those plans. In another reading, however, the conditions that led to the formulation of those plans actually began when al Qaeda was formed out of United States efforts to thwart the USSR in Afghanistan; or, if we actually trace this line of causality even further, to the fact that the breakup of the Ottoman Empire coincided with the prolific need to fuel Euro-American internal combustion engines. Intriguingly, another trajectory was suggested by The 9/11 Commission Report, which identified a root cause of 9/11 as the rise of the Islamic religion and, a few pages later, actually posited that 9/11 was caused because the “unmodernized oil states … created subsidized social welfare programs” and that these “entitlement programs [became] unsustainable. The resulting cutbacks created enormous resentment among recipients who had come to see government largesse as their right.”Footnote 2
The actual photograph, however, omits all these trajectories of the falling man's history. Despite its claim on “actuality” – its insistence that this is an actual photograph of an actual event – we cannot pinpoint what it actually represents.
Not even the actual identity of the falling man – the real person who, for an instant in his life, assumed the subject position of a model posing for an iconic photograph – is certain. As Kroes points out,
the effort at identifying the falling man misses the point of the picture's iconicity … Drew's Falling Man will live on, I am sure, as the photographic equivalent of the Unknown Soldier, as a photographic lieu de mémoire inviting reflections on the history of 9/11 and its meanings.
Kroes is thus making clear that the actual cause of the falling man was that he was photographed.
This act of being photographed both transforms the object and troubles the observer, who, in looking at the photograph, in contextualizing it, in returning it to a sense of history as a shared rather than a purely subjective experience, is complicit in its meaning. As Kroes notes, photography turns us into vicarious witnesses, irrespective of distance and time. It is this aspect of photographs which, when they enter into mass circulation, allows them to “take their place as agents of history.” Kroes is thus very interested in the laudable task of understanding a photograph as an agent of history, a topic for which Falling Man provides an apt focus; not because, as Kroes argues, “the power of iconic photographs derives precisely from our feeling that such photographs have done the work of memory for us,” but rather, at least in the case of Falling Man, because the photo ought to but does not. As such, it is the perfect example of the limit case of photographic representation, as it tumbles toward a collision with history.
Nor is this slippage accidental. Rather, it is the discomfort created by the fissure between identifying and observing, because, like it or not, we are doubled by photography always as both the potential photographic subject and as the spectator whose presence we must evoke to complete the photogenic aspect of our own identity; to identify with the figure we must imagine that figure as existing with the potential to be captured by the photographic frame. And doesn't this photograph capture exactly the immanent collision of the historical with the eternal? The photo seems to ask whether eternity can be only a few stories away, and if so, why, in this photo, for this man, does it seem already to have arrived? It is that it freezes “transient motion” not just into a “lasting stillness,” as Kroes (with the help of Laura Frost) would have it, but also into an aesthetic stillness. The imported criteria of composition and balance give the picture exactly the shape that history lacks. When Drew first viewed the shot on his computer, the “picture just jumped off the screen because of its verticality and symmetry.” Aesthetics arrived, in other words, to save the man from history; henceforth he jumps off the screen instead of off the building. Saving him from history, however, does not save him from death. Rather, it renders him prematurely dead. Turned over to the domain of aesthetic values, he escapes the vicissitudes of history, the imbalances of a life full of ups and downs.
Clearly, the moment, the history, the narrative we are forced to restore produces much of the discomfort and hence controversy about the photo. Devoid of these, we might naively rotate the image, thinking the shot had been printed upside down, or we might think it was a composite of the type used for print ads, the way Cary Grant, for instance, is superimposed in ostensive free fall in some posters for North by Northwest. But something else imposes itself on our vision: the uncanny posture of someone not in free fall, looking instead as though he were strapped into some invisible seat on an amusement park ride. Herein at least the photo produces one horror: the posture disrupts the historical narrative at the same time that the history belies the posture. That this man looks belted in, I cannot help thinking, means that he may be plummeting into the most diabolic of Disney Worlds, taking the ultimate ride at The Great Escape, in which the ominous promise of the trick played by the roller coaster on our senses is finally kept. The secret of the photo's iconicity, circulating in that amusement park known as America, could be how much it evokes the darkest implications of those thrills for which we pay and, in so doing, performs the work of the terrorists by letting us know the actual cost.
