In the majority of the images taken that day the jumpers appear to be struggling against vast disparities of scale; the verticality of the enormous buildings engulfs them. Some are captured holding hands, some with their limbs outstretched, arms like whirlwinds, clothes and shoes ripped from bodies. One woman is suspended with her legs curved backwards over her head, as though practising a graceful mid-air somersault, hovering above a swimming pool, about to make her watery entrance. At variance with this, The Falling Man immediately became such a contentious image for his supposed nonchalance towards his fate. The image was first published on September 12 in hundreds of newspapers all over the world, and was met with unequivocal rage. In most American newspapers, the photograph, taken by Associated Press photographer Richard Drew, ran once and never again. It was deemed exploitative, voyeuristic, invasive, and guilty of turning tragedy into ‘leering pornography’ [Junod 2003].
Additionally, the clear aesthetic elements of the image, that the camera so perfectly encapsulated the vertical alignment of man and building, has contributed to an image which is unbelievable both in its truth and its photographic achievement. Thus the immediate response of horror was twofold: one was faced with a man who chose to jump to his death (officially, the New York Medical Examiner’s Office refuse to term it ‘jumping’, but rather claim that they were ‘forced out, or blown out’) which necessitated a consideration of the conditions in the tower site above impact, and an image that was beautiful, perfectly composed, simultaneously ambiguous and yet unmistakeable.To catch a death as it unravels and embalm it for all time is something that only a camera can do. Recalling the war photographers Robert Capra and Eddie Adams, The Falling Man demonstrates photography’s unmatched capacity to distil a single, historic moment. The Falling Manis shocking in reality and in its existence as a photograph. In reality, the man fell, and kept falling until he disappeared. In the photograph, he is suspended forever, frozen, a certificate of his own presence, but not quite reaching his own demise. Here, photography did not simply transform the horrific into the beautiful; it captured the unbelievable, the unimaginable, and the unpredictable. American writer Tom Junod observed in his 2003 article, which details his search to find the identity of the falling man: ‘In a nation of voyeurs, the desire to face the most disturbing aspects of our most disturbing day was somehow ascribed to voyeurism, as though the jumpers’ experience, instead of being central to the horror, was tangential to it, a sideshow best forgotten’ [Junod 2003]. In a day of tragedy designed and executed as a spectacle, The Falling Man photograph was this ‘sideshow’: the pensive, terrifying, beautiful and repellent image, which not even the terrorists could have predicted.The idea of the unpredictable photograph is epitomised by Drew’sFalling Man. It is a photograph that cannot be controlled, envisioned, or predicted by its captor or its audience. It is an image that returns oneself to the notion of the photographic shock. However, it also entails an unstable beauty; one that could only exist in photography, and never in reality. That is, in the sense that there was nothing beautiful about September 11 2001 when “the jumpers” revealed themselves to the world. The ‘unpredictable’ also necessitates Barthes’punctum: that which rises from the scene, shoots out of it and pierces. While the punctum is necessarily a subjective notion; one which cannot be universally felt, the unpredictable photograph relies on its presence. It’s unpredictability and its subsequent unpredictable beauty is, in essence, its punctum. It is important to note that the authenticity of this photograph was never questioned, despite its radical and unpredictable nature. This is because people believe - even after forty years of post-modern theory and two decades of photoshop - that photographs record something that happened. In 1960, Yves Klein, dressed formally in two-piece suit, hurled himself into the air from a window ledge of a house somewhere in France. The photographic record of this enactment, entitled Leap into the Void, shows the artist caught at the zenith of his trajectory, despite his upward glance suggesting the naïve assumption that he still might manage to fly. However Klein’s leaping photograph is faked, through the device of montage, created as proof of an event which preceded the image, when Klein believed he had in fact successfully levitated.Since 2007 Susan Hiller, taking this image as her starting point, has compiled an extensive bank of internet imagery which documents subjects who depict themselves levitating or flying. Hiller’s Homage to Yves Klein is a delicate balance between criticism and celebration: arguing that we are less gullible than we were when photography was new, Hiller does not attempt to deride the sometimes-ludicrous levitation images, but instead suggests they express ‘a collective aspiration for a revised version of human being - poetic, imaginative and powerful, with as-yet unrealised abilities and potentials’ [Hiller 2008, 3].The levitation images of Hiller and Klein communicate an optimistic view of human capabilities rather than those of photography. The images employed by Hiller are not realistically convincing in their composite nature; the upwards nature of the levitating people are a complete antithesis to Drew’s Falling Man. With regards to Klein’s image, Michael Wetzel considers it ‘triumphant;’ it demonstrates that ‘in photography one does not see the ruins, one always sees the triumph, the triumph of fantasy’ [Derrida 2010, 4]. Indeed The Falling Man does contain a sort of phantasmagoria; it has an oneiric nature which mirrors Klein’s invented, fantastical image. However, one cannot escape that Klein is artificially caught (in reality twelve judo club members are beneath him, holding a tarpaulin, ready to catch his leaping body) whilst The Falling Man is simply falling, photographically suspended, but ultimately hopeless.Although The Falling Man photograph is not faked or staged, as Klein and Hiller’s imagery certifiably is, it is, in its own way, a lie. The photograph is part of a sequence of eleven which Drew captured in the estimated ten seconds it took the man to fall from one hell to another. In the other ten photographs he is not augmented by aesthetics; he falls awkwardly, inelegantly, panicking, entirely human. In truth, the man fell like all the others. In Drew’s own words: ‘It was the luck of the camera. If it was a fraction of a second later that picture wouldn’t be the same … I just held my finger on the button’ [Chicago Sun Times, September 6 2011]. It is the luck of the camera that captured the second of beauty which is devoid in the remaining photographs, none of which have been published. The unpredictable beauty of The Falling Manphotograph and the awareness of distinction between photographer and photographed that it evokes, produces an image which encroaches on the impossibility of – to reference Barthes - a universal punctum.Because of its inadvertent aesthetic qualities and because it was tragic in content, it created uproar. This is the power of the unpredictable photograph: it hits you right in the stomach, but it’s beautiful nonetheless.Derrida, Jacques 2010. Copy, archive, signature: a conversation on photography (Stanford University Press, California)
Published by Line Magazine, Art & Translation edition
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