Why this photographer’s 9/11 ‘Falling Man’ photo remains controversial

Why this photographer's 9/11 'Falling Man' photo remains controversial How Richard Drew's photo of a man falling from the World Trade Center towers on 9/11 came to represent those who fell to their deaths in a 'choiceless choice'.

Key points

• Drew hustled to Times Square to catch a subway train to Chambers Street, one stop before the World Trade Center.
• At 9: 41 a.m., Drew focused his 200mm zoom lens on one man.
• More: The 9/11 attacks hit 25 years ago.
• At the Morning Call, a newspaper in Allentown, Pennsylvania, editors that night were debating which photos to print on Sept.
• The Associated Press news photographer had arrived on the scene to document the Sept.

For context, a woman in a business suit who held down her skirt as she stepped off a ledge. A couple who held hands before jumping together.

Individuals who lost their grip on drapes they hoped would act as a parachute. Faces frozen in shock as they fell for ten seconds at speeds of almost 150 mph.

Richard Drew could hear them land. The Associated Press news photographer had arrived on the scene to document the Sept. 11 attacks on New York's World Trade Center. Far above, individuals trapped on top floors crowded around broken windows as smoke and heat encroached.

As plenty of as 200 victims leapt or fell to certain death in the 102 minutes between the first jet collision and the collapse of both World Trade Center towers.

At 9: 41 a.m., Drew focused his 200mm zoom lens on one man. He snapped a series of frames. One image would capture the horror of 9/11 like no other.

For context, a man pointed straight downward, perfectly in line with the towers' vertical beams, captured at a moment that suggested dignity or calm, his leg bent almost casually, in striking contrast with chaos and destruction around him. A man upside down, like the world itself.

Twenty-five years afterwards, Drew's "Falling Man" photo remains one of the most indelible, harrowing and challenging images of the day – an anonymous man's intimate final moments playing out publicly where most others died out of view.

Notably, the photo's publication fueled an angry backlash, turning it into a taboo image. It led to a search for the falling man's identity, one complicated by religion and grief. Today it's still debated and discussed, provoking questions regarding the definitions of choice, desperation and courage. At the 9/11 Memorial Museum, the photo is sequestered, displayed as a fleeting projection in an alcove. (USA TODAY has chosen to link to it outside of this story.).

Viewers are drawn to the mystery of the unidentified everyman in a photo that sparks the most challenging question: What choice would I create?

Some whose lives were changed by the photo's long afterlife – the veteran photographer who shot it, the magazine writer who supported canonize it as the "unknown soldier" of 9/11, the family of a man often identified as the feasible subject – weigh its complex legacy a quarter century after it came to define 9/11's human cost.

"You have people saying, 'I read this story every year, I look at this photo every year, I think of the falling man every year, '" Tom Junod, who wrote regarding it for Esquire in 2003, lately informed USA TODAY. "And then you have individuals saying, 'Every year I am accosted by this horror. Please create it stop.'".

More: The 9/11 attacks hit 25 years ago. They're still shaping our lives. A photo taken rapidly among chaos.

On the morning of Sept. 11, Drew hauled his camera gear to New York's Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan, regarding 3.5 miles from the World Trade Center, to photograph a maternity fashion show.

It was a routine assignment for a Pulitzer-winning veteran applied to capturing singular moments. He had been close enough to photograph the assassinated Robert F. Kennedy to be spattered by blood.

When a CNN cameraman next to him put his finger to his earphone, drew had set up near the runway. He repeated aloud what the CNN newsroom was telling him, Drew recalled.

"A plane's hit the World Trade Center, " he remarked. Drew's cell phone rang. It was his own editor: "Bag the fashion show. You have to go."

Drew hustled to Times Square to catch a subway train to Chambers Street, one stop before the World Trade Center. By the time he emerged, a second plane had struck the south tower. Both buildings were on fire. The streets filled with smoke and sirens.

In the north tower, employees above the 91st floor were trapped. As smoke and fire raged, cutting off exits, individuals had gathered at the windows, hoping for rescue. Witnesses on the streets realized that among the falling debris were individuals. "Look at that, " Drew recalled an emergency medical worker pointing out.

One Morgan Stanley worker on the 72nd floor of the south tower informed USA TODAY at the time that he watched a woman fall with her back to the ground, landing flat, staring up. Her face was frozen in shock.

USA TODAY estimated that at least 200 individuals jumped to their deaths from the upper floors, numerous pushed by intense smoke and heat, rather than flames. The majority jumped from the north tower.

Bystanders looked up helplessly. Police helicopter pilots hovering near the buildings could do nothing but watch.

Drew, standing at West and Vesey streets, was shooting photos of the burning buildings. He saw individuals falling down toward the ground before losing sight of them.

"I couldn't see any of the people hitting, " he recalled. "I could hear them."

He turned his camera up and snapped photos of some of the falling figures. He zoomed in close on one man. When the towers began collapsing, a first responder pulled him away toward safety.

Back at AP's office at Rockefeller Center, he sorted through a crush of rapidly shot photos. One stood out. A man upside down, in a shirt or tunic, caught in a close-up photo, bisecting both buildings. It indicated no violence or destruction. But it was intensely human.

"We're seeing him in the last moments of his life, " Drew remarked.

Afterwards that day, the photo hit the wire. A family friend who worked at a Colorado newspaper saw it and phoned Drew's wife. This person had been waiting to hear from him against the backdrop of disrupted cell phone service.

Drew didn't yet know the photo would take on a life of its own. The public reacts to the Falling Man.

At the Morning Call, a newspaper in Allentown, Pennsylvania, editors that night were debating which photos to print on Sept. 12 to capture the historically tragic day.

They pinned photos, including Drew's, to a wall to decide, according to interviews with editors in a 2006 documentary "9/11: The Falling Man." Some saw grace and stillness, a personal, painful but powerfully defining image.

"You feel like it's a private moment. It feels almost obscene looking at this, " Michael Hirsch, one of the paper's editors, remarked in the film.

In practice, the photo ran the next day, in Allentown and nationwide, including in the New York Times. (The Associated Press holds the exclusive rights to Drew's image.).

With it came a withering backlash, a flood of complaints from readers. Critics saw it as sensationalistic, voyeuristic.

"Pandering to the most prurient level of human nature, " was how Pennsylvania reader Bob Messinger described it in a letter to the Allentown paper that he read aloud in the documentary.

25 Years of Resilience: USA TODAY looks back on Sept. 11, 2001, and the extraordinary strength, sacrifice and unity that emerged.

In practice, the photo's enduring power comes partly from capturing a final moment, remarked Barbie Zelizer, a University of Pennsylvania media scholar and author of "About to Die: How News Images Move the Public." The image leads the viewer to ponder the mystery of who this man was, why he fell and what one might do in that scenario.

Some saw those who leapt as taking final agency over their inevitable death. But among a traumatized public, even describing someone as having jumped became taboo.

"A 'jumper' is somebody who goes to the office in the morning knowing that they will commit suicide, " a spokeswoman for the New York medical examiner's office informed USA TODAY at the time. "These people were forced out by the smoke and flames or blown out."

For context, the public reaction to Drew's photo meant it largely disappeared from view, something less probable to happen in today's world of cell phone cameras and social media. Heroic images of firefighters searching for survivors and victims in the rubble moved to the front pages.

Taken together, the developments around why this photographer's 9/11 'Falling Man' photo remains controversial point to a situation that is still moving, and the coming days should bring more clarity.