Long, and heartrending. Difficult.
But necessary:
At fifteen seconds after 9:41 A.M., on September 11, 2001, a photographer named Richard Drew took a picture of a man falling through the sky — falling through time as well as through space. The picture went all around the world, and then disappeared, as if we willed it away. One of the most famous photographs in human history became an unmarked grave, and the man buried inside its frame — the Falling Man — became the Unknown Soldier in a war whose end we have not yet seen. Richard Drew’s photograph is all we know of him, and yet all we know of him becomes a measure of what we know of ourselves. The picture is his cenotaph, and like the monuments dedicated to the memory of unknown soliders everywhere, it asks that we look at it, and make one simple acknowledgment.
That we have known who the Falling Man is all along.
There are no pictures. But you should nevertheless bear witness, you owe it to yourself.
After all, the Falling Man is you.
(Link courtesy of Mike.)
Lex,
Respectfully, you are mistaken. The falling man is who we may become, if we choose to. In all things we have a choice. Those choices may be limited, restrictive, and often times unpallatable, but none the less, they are still choices.
More than anything else, though, we still HAVE choices. The falling man had them as well. Admittedly, his pallete of options was limited to a specific set of hues, but he still chose how the image would be made. He chose how he would meet his end. He refused to let others decide that choice for him. In that, he took victory away from the terrorists, and gained a greater victory through his death, than they ever would through theirs. Millions as yet unborn will see his image and remember him. The terrorists who forced him to choose will fade away to nothing over time. He is immortal, while they remian a footnote to history.
We all have choices to make, the question is whether we will make them, or allow others to make them for us.
May God bless these United States, and all their citizens on this day, and all those days to come.
I’m not so certain that millions as yet unborn will see his image and remember him, for it is considered “too graphic” and “serves no newsworthy purpose” in this day and age. In other words, it might be inciteful. You know, might make you angry at the wrong crowd or something. Might get your dander up. Make you want to remember the day and Do Something. Why, that might lead to violence or at least severe realization that all is not rosy.
http://www.sltrib.com/ci_6850019?source=rss
How we went from the film of the Hindenburg and sailors afire at Pearl leaping into the water as being newsworthy to a practical video blackout of the 9/11 attack is a story that historians may tell, but unfortunately I’m fairly certain they won’t be American historians, and they’ll be in a chapter marked “End of a Superpower.” A nation unwilling to see the truth cannot long muster the courage to confront it.
– Max
A lady named Tilly left a 6 part comment on LIttle Green Footballs in 2003, telling of her escape from the 44th floor of one of the WTCs.
A good read, for the first person report of the happenings, like the story linked to this post
Remember, remember the 11th of September,
hijacking terrorism and plot,
I see no reason hijacking, terrorism
should ever be forgot
I would think that we would not display the picture of the “Falling Man” out of simple decency.
Is that the way you would want to remember your husband/son/brother/father/friend?
No more than the mother of that poor dead baby in OKCity, whose grief is freshened and rips at her anew, terrible and unbearable, every time it is shown. She fought to keep the picture out, but no–we as a country have such a strong vein of voyeurism that we must override the rights of the family, those closest, who loved the person most–for a “national symbol?”
I personally find that reprehensible.
doorkeeper
I could not, would not, read the article (sorry Lex) because of my strong feelings about parasites like this journalist, (who took the FM picture).
I find the image of anyone who could stand amid a tragedy where people were bleeding and dying, and take pictures, to be the very epitome of what is wrong with our society, with the human race.
They should be ashamed.
d
“I invite you into the courage of memory, for memory takes courage. It is painful and it is difficult to call up our memories…Their lives should not have been lost in vain, and they will not have been lived in vain if we live ours, as fully and wholly and as completely as we possibly can. Memory and hope – that’s what it’s all about.”
Quote from a benediction given by Rev. Peter Gomes, Harvard University Chaplain, at the 9/11 Memorial conducted in Boston in 2006.
Doorkeeper: I understand, and don’t necessarily disagree, with how you feel. Yet…50 years from now, when first person accounts of 9/11 become less and less available, those images will become the history. Better that it’s recorded in the moment for those who come after us to see – then to provide them with a vacuum that will allow them to forget.
Max,
Sad to say, but you’re probably right about never seeing those pictures again. Maybe it’s the cynic in me, but I’d bet that pictures of the Katrina dead will still be OK, though.
The author got to that pont, and in a way that’s probably better than I could have.
“…the pictures that came out of the death camps of Europe were treated as essential acts of witness, without particular regard to the sensitivities of those who appeared in them or the surviving families of the dead. They were shown, as Richard Drew’s photographs of the freshly assassinated Robert Kennedy were shown. They were shown, as the photographs of Ethel Kennedy pleading with photographers not to take photographs were shown. They were shown as the photograph of the little Vietnamese girl running naked after a napalm attack was shown. They were shown as the photograph of Father Mychal Judge, graphically and unmistakably dead, was shown, and accepted as a kind of testament.”
Should we ignore the concequences of evil and hope that the act of ignoring it makes it go away?
From moments such as these, including the Nazi death camps and the attack on Pearl Harbor to name a few, the pictures we have are increasingly all we have left to remember. Survivors, and their memories, are passing away leaving us only with little more than imagery to jog our collective memory. We look at what they experienced so we don’t forget. Ever.
I’m not ashamed of documenting history, in all it’s forms. The photographer that day was doing his job in capturing the moment and telling the story with his pictures, however shocking and uncomprehending it was at the time.
Pictures of falling humans from 9/11 are suppressed because they invoke not the feeling of tragedy we are groomed to feel but because they stoke outrage.
It’s the difference between yellow ribbons of yearning and battle flags of resolve.
There are those who think we can mourn our way to victory…if they want victory at all.
Very moving, and a suitable memorial.
Sorry doorkeeper, but the photographer has a job to do — preserve history. The picture of the falling man is no less important than the picture of USS Arizona’s magazine exploding or the picture taken on Mt. Suribachi. We live in historical times, and those pictures tell of it. To not take those pictures would be to forever lose the times, places, and events that defined the lives of our forebears.
Can you imagine the Great Depression? When you do, do you not think of an image of a farm wife in threadbare clothes on the step of an unpainted shack in the dust bowl? Or perhaps it is the image of a man in a suit selling apples on a street corner? Or maybe a Model A filled to the tipping point with all the property a family owns?
Those images were due to photography, somebody creating a snapshot in time of the moment. That snapshot lives on, reminding us constantly of what went before.
Which is why the blackout of 911 video is so disgusting, as if we can wish away that day by simply not showing that it happened.
– Max
Max, Kris and DoorKeeper – I agree many of your points. I feel that perserving history through photographs is our way of retelling what truly happened and leaves less room for future interpretation. As far as what DoorKeeper was saying in that I believe that there are others out there taking photo’s for the wrong reasons. Are they taking them for financial gain or are they taking them to capture and memorialize history? I feel that in order for us as well as our children to learn from our past we need to know what happened and how people felt at the time. In my opinion photos tell the best story. And frankly not all stories are happy ones. It is true that a picture says a thousand words without speaking a word.