Abstract
This article deconstructs the events surrounding the initial deletion of Richard Drew's Falling Man photograph from the archive of September 11. Via such philosophers as Paul Ricoeur and Georges Didi-Huberman, it explores the ethical implications of examining the photograph, both by itself and in montage , and investigates American views of death and dying in that context. The testimonies and images that followed the collapse of the World Trade Center brought to the fore several prescient, though often ignored, philosophical questions which surround the nature of the image, its role in shaping the narrative of an event, and whether an image of a man in the last seconds of his life, directly following his decision to die but preceding his death, functions as a reminder that we might carefully interrogate what it means to deem something unimaginable, unfathomable, unrepresentable.
Highlights
Given the nature of twenty-four hour news channels, the internet, newspapers, magazines, and written narratives, we all became witnesses to an event that many deemed too horrific for certain types of representation, despite the fact that we, collectively and as a society, watched it happen
Journalists, photographers, and eyewitnesses went to great lengths to preserve what they saw and heard that morning, largely due to the American public’s demand for up-to-the-minute archiving, and the public responded with consternation: the direct attack on our fear of mortality, the destruction of the World Trade Center, and the testimonies and images that followed, brought to the fore several prescient, though often ignored, philosophical questions that I will investigate here
All of these were eclipsed by a more common judgment, one that reflects the visceral feelings that the photograph produced: “I felt like I was punched in the stomach [when I saw the photograph]
Summary
Given the nature of twenty-four hour news channels, the internet, newspapers, magazines, and written narratives, we all became witnesses to an event that many deemed too horrific for certain types of representation, despite the fact that we, collectively and as a society, watched it happen. Journalists, photographers, and eyewitnesses went to great lengths to preserve what they saw and heard that morning, largely due to the American public’s demand for up-to-the-minute archiving, and the public responded with consternation: the direct attack on our fear of mortality, the destruction of the World Trade Center, and the testimonies and images that followed, brought to the fore several prescient, though often ignored, philosophical questions that I will investigate here These questions surround the nature of the image, its role in shaping the narrative of an event, and whether an image of a man in the last seconds of his life, directly following his decision to die but preceding his death, functions as a reminder that we might carefully interrogate what it means to deem something unimaginable, unfathomable, unrepresentable. Even within the media circus that 9/11 became, one kind of image quickly became taboo: though we demanded photographic evidence of what occurred and planted ourselves in front of our televisions to watch the loop of footage that is emblazoned in our brains, we were offended--even viscerally repulsed--when the media fed us photographs and video of people jumping from the towers in the moments before their collapse
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