I slept through the original, live footage and woke to radio commentary that as I pulled on tracky daks for my morning walk told me something horrible had happened, but not what. It had taken five years but, at last, we were collectively able to turn our eyes back to that dreadful day and look again. ![]() What really interested me about the film, and, indeed, about the outpouring of images and memorials about 9/11 five years after the event, was the sense that, for the first time, we had gained a necessary distance. The ‘dignified’ photo was a fluke, but the power of the image was not diminished, at least for me. They showed us the full sequence of images that the photographer had shot of the man, and he was not dignified he was tumbling, out of control, in the way implacable gravity would demand of all of us. Of course, the film makers eventually revealed that the Falling Man’s dignity was an illusion. The documentary was fascinating and, after a few false starts, appeared to establish the identity of the man in the photograph, leading to an intensely moving interview with the man’s grieving sister. Whoever he was, he appeared to have maintained his dignity in the most horrible of all imaginable situations. The falling man looked peaceful, almost relaxed as he plummeted to certain death. ![]() ![]() It was a strikingly arresting photograph. His was one of the iconic images of the day, the one many newspaper editors chose to feature prominently in their 9/12 editions. It was a deeply disturbing narrative about the search to identify a person who was photographed falling or, as is more likely, jumping to his death from one of the Twin Towers before they collapsed. A couple of weeks ago, on the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attack on New York, I watched the documentary The Falling Man.
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