FALLING (1)
Abstract: ‘The Falling Man’, a photograph taken by Richard Drew on the morning of September 11th 2001 has accompanied me throughout the past 12-years. The journey of this photograph: the discourse around it and the continuing attempts to censor the imagery, has become synonymous with a personal censorship of the visual, symbolic and actual noise of the World Trade Towers falling. This paper links interrelated themes into an examination of the tension where trauma meets memory and is the first of a series of investigations balancing the auto-ethnographic with the critical, utilising personal experiences to facilitate a greater understanding of trauma and its wider cultural implications.
‘Headlong, free fall… he was a falling angel and his beauty was horrific.’ (Delilo, 2007: 222)
Abstract: ‘The Falling Man’, a photograph taken by Richard Drew on the morning of September 11th 2001 has accompanied me throughout the past 12-years. The journey of this photograph: the discourse around it and the continuing attempts to censor the imagery, has become synonymous with a personal censorship of the visual, symbolic and actual noise of the World Trade Towers falling. This paper links interrelated themes into an examination of the tension where trauma meets memory and is the first of a series of investigations balancing the auto-ethnographic with the critical, utilising personal experiences to facilitate a greater understanding of trauma and its wider cultural implications.
‘Headlong, free fall… he was a falling angel and his beauty was horrific.’ (Delilo, 2007: 222)
Background: On September 11th 2001, at 8.46am, Flight 11 crashed into the north face of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The Boeing 767 ploughed through the building core between the 93rd and 99th floor and severed all of the three encased stairwells. Fox 5 News (WNYW) televised the first report of the incident at 8.48am, and from 8.51am until 10am over 200 people jumped to their deaths primarily from the North Tower - exact numbers remain unknown. Present at the scene, Richard Drew pointed his camera upwards and photographed as many of the jumpers as he could until the Towers collapsed and he was forced to run for safety.
When he revisited the photographs from that morning he found the sequence of one particular falling man. One frame highlighted for him the catastrophe of the day’s events, a striking image of a figure dressed in black and white soaring downwards headfirst like a bullet, one leg bent almost casually against the other, his white shirt billowing outwards from the violence of his descent. Drew had captured the last beautiful and shocking moments before a man’s death, before a body lands and disintegrates, a wingless body mid-flight, diving to its demise against the stark graphic composition of the light and dark the steel and glass of the huge tower that was to crumble fall and disappear moments later. The following morning on September 12th, the image was published on the front page of the ‘Morning Call’, page-7 of the New York Times and in newspapers around the world. Its appearance caused a public outcry, quickly this image and others depicting the falling were removed from the public gaze, and many US papers were forced to defend themselves against the charge of exploiting a man’s death. In the most photographed and videotaped day in history, the images of people jumping were the only images that were censored. The expression of outrage from America at its publication and the ensuing dialogue from many New Yorkers since, has secured this iconic image’s place in the telling of the story of the collapse of the twin towers. In ‘What Do Pictures Want?’ David Mitchell (2005:10) writes: ‘We need to reckon with not just the meaning of images but their silence, their reticence, their wildness and nonsensical obduracy. We need to account for not just the power of images but their powerlessness, their impotence, their abjection.’ So what does this picture of The Falling Man want? And what was it about this image that Americans found so offensive they censored it? |
Conclusion: ‘That which does not fit within the established structures of thinking and feeling is very likely to be excluded from remembrance.’(Zarecka, 2009:121) The Falling Man and the others who jumped or fell from the Twin Towers created a huge dilemma, that of ‘innocent victim’ (falling), verses ‘bad victim’ (jumpers). ‘Dying so spectacularly, so calmly The Falling Man awkwardly echoed the journey of his killers.’ (Adi Drori-Avraham, 2006:295) It was only by turning away from the image that one could avoid confronting this predicament. Our ability to mourn lies in our capacity to acknowledge loss, in which we uncover something about ourselves and reveal our connection to others. We can mourn the ‘good victim’, imperfections are overlooked and forgotten, but accepting ones fate or even choosing the way of dying upsets the parameters of being a ‘good victim’, embracing death blurs the boundaries between good and evil and so victim and terrorist. In censoring the image of The Falling Man an aspect of mourning 9/11 was denied and he became symbolic of an unresolvable paradox, a trapped melancholia, a figure frozen in time, never quite reaching his death. Living inside the event as it unfolded makes it impossible for me not to write from within that place. Unraveling the conflicting layers of significance within the iconography of The Falling Man has allowed the opportunity to revisit the past and find a language to render understandable, that which defied understanding. Re-examining from a distance and finding a language of expression opens up new possibilities for interpretation whilst preserving the narrative of loss. ‘The wound of the mind—the breach in the mind’s experience of time, self and the world—is not, like the wound of the body, a simple and healable event, but rather an event that...is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known’. (Caruth, 1996:4). This would perhaps explain the censorship in US media, it would explain the distance of time required for revisiting the images of the jumpers in an attempt to reimagine, or redefine the past. The Falling Man has become the iconic representative not only of the jumpers but also of all the victims that were killed on that day, symbolic of the unimaginable, the unnameable– or more precisely the attempted naming, in its brief presence in the American press and TV on September 12th 2001, and then its rejection. The image disrupted the framework from which the event of September 11th was narrated. The lack of perspective throws the viewer out of understanding and therefore out of connection to the scale of the terror and catastrophe. This man hurtles to his death, outside of the rest of the tragedy, unimpeded by the destruction that surrounded him, intact against a background of perfect geometry. His anonymity connects all the anonymous deaths of war and terror, his falling bridges historical moments in time. In witnessing the falling man we are forced to witness ourselves. Rejecting the image symbolizes a collapse of witnessing, ‘a crisis of truth, an historical enigma betrayed by trauma’ (Caruth,1995:6). Censorship in this instance became a simplistic response to a complex situation, a measure of control upon a set of circumstances that were out of control. America did not want the watching world to witness its own falling, did not want to appear weak or vulnerable to the rest of the world so it censored. Which for The Falling symbolized a double negation: both unidentified and erased from the public gaze. Full version Published in http://people.brunel.ac.uk/bst/vol1102/ |
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