Its 12:30am on a Saturday and I've just finished watching a Discovery Networks piece about a photograph entitled "The Falling Man."
The photo was taken during the hours of the World Trade Center disaster on 9/11/01.
Driving the 1hr 45min documentary was one man's search for the identity of the man in the photograph.
As the searcher begins his journey into this sacred and painful photograph you begin to discover along with him the many reasons why America had such a difficult time with this one photograph.
As stated in the Documentary, the media did not want to put focus on the victims, some 200 of which had jumped or fell out of windows to their death, but instead hyped the heroism of the rescue efforts.
The photograph was run in one paper "The Morning Call" the following day on September 12th, but hasn't been printed in any paper or magazine since. After running the photo the paper received a monumentally angry response from a stunned American public. Though the media considered it to be one of those rare pictures that reflects life-altering events that can change the way we view our future, its impact was simply too much for a grief stricken nation and the photo was pulled from publication.
The documentary touches on many of our thoughts and feelings about the photograph. It was very gratifying to see the researcher discover something as important, if not more important, than the identity of the person in the photograph, but I'm not gonna spill the beans here. You'll have to check it out for yourself.
What I enjoyed about this documentary is discovering the influence a single photograph can have on an individual just by viewing it. Watching your own thoughts try to grasp the feelings of "The Falling Man" just seconds earlier as he grapples with the decision to jump instead of burn up in the north tower. The calm reserved manner of his body language and its alignment to the building as depicted in the photo. More thoughts of "What Would You Do?" if in the same circumstances with the same exact decisions confronting you.
The Circumstances. Something pretty much none of us alive today can even fathom. And yet in the photograph, "The Falling Man" appears to me to be at peace with his decision and is leaving the outcome, body and soul, in his God's hands.
It may anger you, it may frighten you, it may make you cry. The one thing this documentary won't do is have you saying "Thank God It Wasn't Me." Because in the end "The Falling Man" photograph makes it personal. In the end it is you and me we're watching fall from the 106th floor to our death. The only difference being that we're left alive wondering what it was like, while "The Falling Man" died knowing what it was like.
Peace Be With You "The Falling Man"
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