English Free Write
There is no such thing as a photograph that should not exist. Or should not be viewed. The photograph of The Falling Man is no different. It is a very important photograph, in fact. Like many others, it shows mankind in one of its most raw forms - desperation. It shows someone without options, without hope. People are afraid to look at things without censor or edit because they are afraid to see inside the human soul. People look at 9/11 and say “this is a tragedy, let us learn from it and move on.” Yes, let’s move on. But jesus christ, don’t discredit the human beings that were in it by just painting over their desperate actions.
The man in this photograph threw himself from a building. Did he hope to save himself? Was he trying to escape something? The world will never know. But one thing was apparent - he was acting on pure, raw emotion. That’s not something you can easily capture. It’s not even something you can easily find. These days, everyone wants to hide away any scrap of raw emotion we can find. Everything has to be politically correct, in check, in moderation, don’t give it all, don’t take it all. No one wants to re-find that joy that we see in a baby’s laughter, because to do so, you also have to re-discover the absolute, sheer terror you see when a baby cries from its parent walking away. It’s those raw emotions that people push away until we eventually become a cold, unfeeling society. Because we are willing to push away the raw negative emotions - sacrificing the positive ones.
Perhaps this photograph is why. Perhaps they see a man in raw fear, unable to fear anything more, and it drove him mad. There’s no way to prove that. There’s no way to be certain. All we know for certain is what we can see - and people make assumptions. Raw emotion scares us, and that’s why people want to hide the picture.
People talk a lot about respecting the dead and blahblahblah, all that crap about how we shouldn’t talk negatively about them; we shouldn’t show them disrespect. In a tragic event such as 9/11, even a man who was the world’s biggest prick will get the utmost reverence because GASP! He died in 9/11. Therefore, when something like this photograph comes up to capture the reality of this event, people want to shove it away. No, these men were all heroes; no one went mad! No one was driven to insanity from this! They were perfectly sane, strong individuals who fought for liberty! The truth of the matter is, people need to stop hiding and face things like this photograph. No matter how tragic someone’s death is, or how completely obscure it is (like, I dunno, a double suicide with cyanide with your new wife…hello, Mr. Hitler), everyone who dies, before they died, was a human being. No one should be treated as a god just because they are no longer with us. Everyone has flaws, everyone has good qualities. People go insane in dire times. When there is no other escape, sometimes, a human being will jump out of a building. Stop hiding from the picture, and face it.
From an artist’s standpoint, it is amazing how well-constructed this photograph is. I honestly wouldn’t believe it wasn’t staged. The way the man bisects the two buildings and then the two-thirds composition vertically is absolutely amazing. The photographer is obviously talented if he can snap an action photo like this just off the cuff, especially in a time when everything was moving so quickly. I can’t even get a well-composed photo in a YMCA basketball game with the worst ranked team in the league. So from an artistic standpoint, ignoring what the photo stands for entirely, this picture really is amazing. Even the diagonal lines from where the sun is hitting the building lead you in to the focal point of the falling man.
There is no good reason to hide this photo away from anyone’s eyes. It is the truth of humanity captured in one beautifully artistic setting. Honestly, it’s about time that people start opening their eyes and seeing the truth about their own kind, because so many people are hiding away from the truth. It only gets worse as time progresses.
Looking at this picture, I will admit, there are some questions that even run through my head. Why is he positioned the way he is? One leg straight down (or up, seeing as how he’s upside-down) and the other pulled up so that he’s almost in second position. (Could use a better toe point though.) Is he upside-down because he was spinning, or was he plummeting head-first? Obviously, if he was going head-first, he chose to stare directly at the building he was exiting from instead of the incoming ground. Did he just not want to watch his impending doom, or did he desire to watch the hell he was leaving? And most of all, the thing that leads me to believe he was driven mad and that is why he threw himself from the building, what did he hope to accomplish, going from one death to another? To lessen his suffering? Did he think there was a slim hope that he could be rescued if he jumped? And what could possibly go through one’s mind in what I imagine would seem like the eternity from the moment his feet left the building to the moment he lost all consciousness? I’ve always been under the understanding that when you jump, it feels like an eternity…that’s a long time to be thinking.