After the attacks, there was a push within the media not to show certain images from September The TV networks stopped showing endless footage of the World Trade Center towers collapsing, feeling it was exploiting the victims.
Readers recoiled. Tom Junod: I had just come back from a trip out to Oregon for a different story that I wrote, about oil field workers being held captive in Honduras. We were in Shelter Island, [New York]. The next morning, I was hungry to read a newspaper. All the papers. We came back home to look at them. I opened it up, and there was the picture of a man who had fallen from the building, had jumped from the building.
It was like immediate recognition, for a couple of reasons. It put me on notice that the world had changed in some sort of fundamental way. It also put me on notice that one day I would want to write about the story. Junod: At the time.
It was what happened behind him, and what happened above him. That summer, I went to the top of the World Trade Center for the first time. We went to the top, and we looked out the window. If they had made the decision to jump, what had influenced that decision? The thing about the photo that is haunting to this moment is that, when you look at the photo, it looked as if a decision had been made.
There was a certain resolute quality to it. There was a certain peace to it that drew me in immediately. If he were not falling, he might very well be flying. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. He appears comfortable in the grip of unimaginable motion. The so-called "Falling Man" was snapped by Associated Press photographer Richard Drew as he fell from the North Tower on September 11, - yet 20 years on, we still don't know his name. Drew had been shooting a maternity fashion show nearby when he heard a plane had just hit the World Trade Centre.
By the time the veteran photographer, now 74, arrived at the scene of devastation, the air was so filled with smoke and debris that he had no idea a second plane had hit the South Tower until he was told by a police officer. As he watched the horror unfold, he saw what other onlookers had noticed within minutes of the first attack - people falling from the buildings. Drew took dozens of photos on the darkest day in American history, but one more than any other would be remembered by millions across the world forever.
Taken at 9. Many attempts have been made to identify the Falling Man over the last 20 years, but none have so far proved successful. The camera took the picture of the falling man," Drew told CBS. I didn't see it. The image was printed by The New York Times the day after the attacks, but was labelled by critics as "exploitative" and "voyeuristic", and it was two years before it appeared in another major publication.
I made a photographic record of someone living the last moments of his life. And every time I look at it, I see him alive. I have photographed dying. As a year-old rookie photographer on a supposedly routine assignment, I was standing behind Robert F. Kennedy when he was assassinated. That time, there was no telephoto lens to distance me. I was so close that his blood spattered onto my jacket.
Pictures that, shot through my tears, still distress me after 35 years. Nobody looked away. The RFK assassination changed the fabric of American history. But then, so did the destruction of the World Trade Center.
The Kennedy pictures were more graphic and, in one sense, more personal. We knew him, as a public figure, a brother, a father and a husband.
It took me the better part of a year after Sept. Then The Associated Press sent me to a camp run by former British special forces for training in how to survive in a hostile situation. But I found it comforting. Knowing how to take even a few preventive measures gave me back a sense of control over my destiny. The picture became an instant icon and won the Pulitzer Prize. But no one in the States worried about getting napalmed. The photo evoked sympathy, not empathy.
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