The Falling Man analysis:

The photograph I have chosen for this assessment is The Fallen Man.
It was taken by Richard Drew, a journalist for Associated Press, in
2001 moments after the 9/11 terror attacks on the World Trade
Centre in New York City.

It is one of the very few photos published in the aftermath of 9/11

showing a person dying from the attacks. It ran in several U.S
newspapers on September 12th, but never again after readers
reacted in horror to its publication. The subject in Drew’s image has
never been formally identified, but reporters who investigated the
falling man’s identity in the aftermath believed them to have been an
employee of the restaurant Windows of the World, which operated
on the top two floors of the north tower.

I chose this photograph for a few reasons. Firstly, the photograph has
quite a striking visual composition – the linear patterns of the World
Trade Centre catch the eye, with the subject ‘bisecting the towers
like an arrow’ as the photographer describes it.

It also stood out to me as it depicts 9/11 and terrorism more broadly

as a human experience. Many of us would define 9/11 by the images
of the collapsing towers, but Drew’s photograph shows an actual
victim of the attack that adds a human element to a mass tragedy.
This image may force us to put ourselves in the subject’s shoes and
question what we would have done in this horrific situation.

Connection between photos:

Our photos are connected by their depiction of the horror and terror
of 9/11, as well as their ethical ambiguity. They force us to confront
the ethics of publishing photographs of death and violence, and
whether it exploits the suffering of victims or fulfils an ethical duty to
acknowledge images of violent events that have occurred in history,
as Linfield suggested in last week’s readings.

These photos speak to Sontag’s claim that photography is inherently

brutal and voyeuristic – one shows someone falling to their death,
while the other shows a subject standing at Ground Zero in the
aftermath. Publishing the Falling Man could be seen as stripping the
subject of their dignity and privacy in their final moments, while on
the other hand the other image shows the suffering of a survivor,
carrying out the traumatic task of searching for fellow survivors while
also coming to terms with a terror attack on their city.

Overall, we believe both images show the horror of 9/11 from a

perspective rarely seen by the public, while also pushing boundaries
of what is ethical photography.