How do you feel about the selection of The Falling Man photo?

<p>TIME magazine put out a video describing the story behind "The Falling Man" picture from 9/11.<br>

<a href="

- 4:17</p>

<p>My take is, the photo was selected from a number of similar shots as the man was falling and thought to be "It" because that particular picture had artistic merit - rather distasteful, I thought. </p>

<p>What's your take? Do you think the picture pays tribute to the falling man whose identity remains unknown? And why is artistic merit important for such a photo? </p>

<p>It is a standard journalistic device to focus on one individual to express the impact of a major event. An image with strong graphic power will express this best. "Artistic merit" as such was not a consideration - this image will forever attract viewers and, from those who do not know, elicit the question "What's happening?" On learning the answer, they will vividly understand the magnitude of the events of 9/11. Which is what great journalism is all about.</p>

<p>Since the man is unknown, perhaps it is akin to a tomb of the unknown soldier. I agree that it was selected due to its merit: something about its alignment of vertical lines and its perpendicularity without requiring cropping. I suppose the picture editor wanted to pick one out of the many, which is what they do.</p>

<p>I'm not sure, as David expressed, that artistic merit - whatever that is - was a consideration for Time's selecting the image in question. Also, I'm not sure that it pays much tribute to the falling man; rather, it evokes strong emotion (it did with me) centered on the sheer horror of anyone falling to death from more than 100 stories above street level. </p>

<p>I get a healthy dose of 9-11 even here in far-flung Iowa, several hundred miles from where all this took place. I don't think this one suicide sums up 9-11 very well. It's tragic and sad, but it seems wrong to focus on just one man's death, even if it's meant to be symbolic of the entire affair. He was one of the lucky ones, in a sense. He got to choose. Yes, the choices sucked, but those on the impact floors, those in the planes, they got no choice at all. Their lives were snuffed out, without warning, by hate-filled assholes they didn't even know.</p>

<p>A better choice would have been a collage of all the lives lost on that fateful day. But TIME didn't ask me.</p>

The composition focuses the viewer on a single individual, using the buildings as backdrop. Making it about one person

humanizes the tragedy. It was a real change from the way we'd seen it on tv, zoomed out to see the entire buildings. That

way it was difficult to see the event at the human level. It looked like a crime against property. This view emphasized that

it was a crime against people while also empowering the victim. The viewer infers from his posture that he's in control.

 

To me this is the defining image from the day. The power and story of the photo can't be unlinked from the artistic merit.

<p>There were an estimated 200 "jumpers" on 9/11; every single one a human being with friends and family dying in the most horrific way imaginable.</p>

<p>There was nothing quiet about that moment as described in the video. There was no dignity. There were no good-byes. There was only the most horrifying few seconds of imminent death in the most public way.</p>

<p>How would the falling man feel about becoming the symbol of 9/11 portrayed in such a way? Would it matter? Should we care? What if you were the falling man?</p>

<p>Photographers and editors will understandably always choose that image from the batch, if they had to choose, but I question the motive notwithstanding the poetic words one might associate or melodramatic music accompanying the image to accentuate mood. </p>

<p> </p>

<p>Sublime.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>I don't think this one suicide sums up 9-11 very well. It's tragic and sad, but it seems wrong to focus on just one man's death, even if it's meant to be symbolic of the entire affair. He was one of the lucky ones, in a sense. He got to choose. Yes, the choices sucked, but those on the impact floors, those in the planes, they got no choice at all.</p>

</blockquote>

<p>I wouldn't call that either a 'suicide' or a 'choice'. It was probably jump or burn to death, no real choice at all, and no chance of survival either way.</p>

<p>I can understand Michael's discomfort, and would agree if I thought the photographer and editor were thinking _just_ about the aesthetics of the image (George Rodger: "When I could look at the horror of Belsen - and think only of a nice photographic composition I knew something had happened to me, and it had to stop"). But there's no reason to believe that here. Yes, they were professionals, and had to think about what David calls 'graphic power' to do their jobs properly, but all in the service of communicating the horror of the events with compassion for the victims.</p>

<p>One photo that won the Pulitzer Prize featured a starving African child with a vulture looming in the background. A journalist's job is to capture reality, no matter whom it affects. There are no exceptions or special protections for certain classes of people.</p>

<p>My own 'Hippocratic' oath is very simple, and one article states that I must make people look as good as possible. So even if I were a paparazzo, I'd never embarrass my subjects.</p>

<p>With regard to the function of individuals as symbols of major events, this thread has reminded me of something I had almost forgotten. I live in a small town on the English Channel coast, like many people I have a daily newspaper delivered by my local newsagent, and in 2001 this was a Mr. Lawn, a very pleasant man with whom I often had a few minutes' conversation when paying my weekly bill. More than anything else it was the death of his son Steven Lawn in the WTC, and the devastating effect which this had on his parents, which brought the tragedy home to me and helped me to feel how this level of pain and grief was being experienced by others nearly 3,000 times over.</p>

<p>I see no merit, artistic or otherwise to watching someone die.</p>

<p><em>I see no merit, artistic or otherwise to watching someone die.</em><br>

It is a well-observed journalistic convention that images of persons at the point of death or being murdered are not shown, nor are close-ups, or particularly horrific images, of dead people. This represents progress from the position in the first two or three decades of the 20th century, during which period images such as the Ruth Snyder execution<br>

http://cdn.klimg.com/kapanlagi.com/p/97335415-web.jpg<br>

and pictures of murder victims<br>

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/shocking-photos-famed-crime-photographer-weegee-gallery-1.1282477?pmSlide=1.1282466<br>

were commonplace.<br>

I personally consider this picture<br>

http://time.com/3679103/at-the-gates-of-hell-the-liberation-of-bergen-belsen-april-1945/<br>

to be an outstanding example of an occasion in which it is essential to show dead bodies, underscoring that the little boy in the picture has lived for so long in the middle of bestial violence that he is no longer fazed by it - it seems normal to him.</p>

<p>Just a quick sincere thanks to everyone for contributing your thoughts. I've learned a lot from your shared perspectives. </p>

<p>Death is not an easy subject to deal with and becomes especially controversial when photography gets involved. </p>

<p>What's also interesting to me is, this type of controversy doesn't exist with videos shot on that day probably because no single video was given the attribution of outstanding cinematography or artistic presentation - they were truly documenting the event as they saw it without any thought to aesthetics, pre or post event. </p>

Usually visual simplicity is required for an image to stand out and be remembered and to get iconic status. I think this

image portrays well the despair of those who couldn't get out of the towers safely. A certain degree of graphical beauty is

needed so that people will look at the image instead of turning away. An image showing people in the rubble or body

parts scattered around would cause people to look away and perhaps forget more quickly. I think the "Falling Man" avoids

being too gross to look at yet manages to convey the panic and desolation of the victims.

<p>I think it would be a hard choice to say, yes, use that photo to publish. But I can imagine for an editor who's job it is to make news papers sell, it may be a hard choice to say no.</p>

<p>It would not be my style to use that type of photo. Tell the story with another shot. There were plenty of spectacular shots depicting that horrible event. </p>

<p>A photo of one unfortunate soul's sad predicament and imminent doom, for what? To sell papers because nobody else has that shot. Will it really sell more papers than a shot of the building falling or the explosion of the plane coming out of the building. The falling man photo would not ease the suffering of the families but it might cause more pain, putting one more fine horrible detail for voyeurs to gawk at. Am I missing the point.</p>

<p>But then I think of the photo; Saigon execution: Murder of a Vietcong by Saigon Police Chief, 1968.<br>

<a href="http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/saigon-execution-murder-vietcong-saigon-1968/">LINK</a> A very powerful photo telling a story of the brutality of that war. I have to ask, is the falling man photo in that league. Why do I want to give one photo a pass and the other not. The photos are different in a sense but both have historical significance. The brutality of what happened being told down to the gory details. One is closer to home perhaps. So do we sensor the news, soften it, or publish it with a warning of graphic content. Maybe they needed to be published, but I don't have to like it.<br>

<br>

This event lead the battle cry to war. Two countries were devastated from that war leaving a region of the world in turmoil that we are still seeing the repercussions of today. It changed the paradigm of this country and parts of the world. That photo is part of history as horrible as it is. Maybe it needed to be published, but I don't have to like it.</p>

<p>How anyone could be so insensitive as to post up a question about this is beyond me.<br>

When you consider that he does not even have the dignity of a name, the picture is casually disrespectful.<br>

When you consider a little further and learn that the debris from the WTC site was shipped off to China, you may wonder further, why, at a place where 3000 people were murdered, no DNA was gathered or respect shown to the victims by the US authorities. This forum is obviously not the right one for going further, but I am a lot more paranoid now than when I was young and most things seemed quite simple to understand.<br>

The WTC attacks were on a whole new level of complexity and it's not enough to just raise points on the aesthetics of this photo without thinking of it's much darker meaning.</p>

<p><em>... insensitive ... question ... disrespectful.</em><br>

Andrew, I fully accept that you feel the publication of this picture was insensitive, but asking the question in the way that Michael did was surely legitimate, and I personally, for the reasons stated in previous posts, feel that this publication was within the bounds of accepted taste. It is in the public interest to see how an event occurred which was so catastrophic that an uninjured healthy individual chose to leap to certain instant death rather than succumb slowly to fire or crushing. This is not at all to say that the picture is not shocking or horrible - as such, it is accurate reportage of the murder of nearly 3,000 people. Like it or not, professional journalists have to deal with situations like this and do not have the option which private citizens have of turning away and keeping silent. I hope you understood my previous comment about artistic merit not being a consideration - NO ONE but NO ONE approached this task with the aim of selecting a "pretty picture".<br>

With regard to your comment on DNA, I imagine that the simple if sad answer is that any DNA would have been so pulverised, fire-damaged and diluted by the thousands of tonnes of falling masonry and the subsequent firefighting water that recovery would have been physically impossible.</p>

<p>DNA was in fact successfully recovered and analysed from the remains of many of the victims - well over half have so far been matched to samples provided by their families. This was indeed technically very challenging for the sorts of reasons that David suggests, and new forensic methods had to be developed to achieve it. The research and new identifications continue today, and the remains of unknown victims are treated with due respect. Scrap metal from the WTC was disposed of by auction and bought by companies from several countries, including China. I'm not sure what this is supposed to prove, but it does seem to be a popular topic amongst conspiracy theorists, who interpret pretty much everything as an attempt to 'hide the evidence'. I can't, incidentally, think of anything much more disrespectful to the victims than making up stories about how they were killed, and presenting these stories as fact, often using misrepresented or doctored images of the real tragedy. The picture editor of a respected publication will be bound by common standards of journalistic ethics when dealing with highly emotive images from 9/11. Some guy on Youtube, not so much.</p>

<p>Andrew:</p>

<p>I agree with Richard, why do you assume that no effort was made to recover DNA? Where is your evidence? And where is the lack of respect? Every anniversary there is a big deal made about the attacks and it is never far from the news. Politicians and everyone are eager to pay tribute at any given time of day. There is a large monument to the fallen and very impressive and expensive it is too. Sorry, I just don't see it. It is a deeply unpleasant image, but powerful. There are many, many worse that were never shown publicly in the US, but were shown overseas to people who were less directly affected.</p>