Twenty-five years after Sept. 11, Richard Drew’s picture of a man falling from the World Trade Center still lands with the force of something unfinished. The photographer captured the image at 9:41 a.m., and one frame from that burst of shots became known as The Falling Man.
Drew was not even supposed to be there. He had started the morning in Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan, where he was assigned to photograph a maternity fashion show, then moved to Times Square and took a subway train to Chambers Street after hearing that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. When he turned his 200mm zoom lens toward the towers, he caught one man in a straight line down, aligned with the building’s vertical beams, as if the photograph were trying to impose order on chaos.
That is part of why the image still draws people back. It is not only one of the most harrowing pictures from the Sept. 11 attacks. It is also a record of a single death made public, and that made publication combustible. The photo set off an angry backlash and a search for the man’s identity, a search made harder by religion and grief. In simple terms, the man could not be confirmed by appearance alone, and the emotional costs of trying to name him only deepened the distress around the image.
Tom Junod wrote about the photograph for Esquire in 2003, and his own reaction captured the split that has followed it ever since. “I read this story every year, I look at this photo every year, I think of the falling man every year,” he said. In the next breath, he added, “Every year I am accosted by this horror. Please make it stop.” Some people return to the picture as an act of memory. Others want it gone for the same reason: it refuses to soften what it shows.
That tension is why The Falling Man remains so carefully handled in public. At the 9/11 Memorial Museum, it is shown as a fleeting projection in an alcove, not a display that demands the room. The museum treatment matches the image’s uneasy place in public life: it is both a dignified moment and an unbearable public record, and 25 years on, the question is not whether the photograph survived the attacks. It did. The question is how much longer a city, and a country, can keep looking at it without looking away.
