Who is falling man from 911




















It got fact-checked. Granger signed off. Then he gave it to an editor named Peter Griffin. Peter was like the ninja editor at Esquire. He just cut the last two paragraphs. There was not even any argument about it, at all.

And then, boom, pretty much they hit send and it went to the printer. Listen to the full interview with Junod and another interview with James B. Dave and Chris welcome back chef Diep Tran to celebrate the treasured elixir that is Red Boat Fish Sauce before embarking on a whirlwind survey of their all-time favorite potluck play—Vietnamese summer rolls. Plus David and Kaz open the show discussing the beef between Lince Dorado and the father of superfan Izzy. Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.

By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. Flipboard Email. Sign up for the The Ringer Newsletter Thanks for signing up! Check your inbox for a welcome email.

Email required. Now, as he worked on his sculpture, he sought to express the extremity of his feelings by making a monument to what he calls the "extremity of choice" faced by the people who jumped.

He worked nine months on the larger-than-life bronze he called Tumbling Woman , and as he transformed a woman tumbling on the floor into a woman tumbling through eternity, he succeeded in transfiguring the very local horror of the jumpers into something universal—in redeeming an image many regarded as irredeemable.

The day after Tumbling Woman was exhibited in New York's Rockefeller Center, Andrea Peyser of the New York Post denounced it in a column titled "Shameful Art Attack," in which she argued that Fischl had no right to ambush grieving New Yorkers with the very distillation of their own sadness … in which she essentially argued the right to look away.

Because it was based on a model rolling on the floor, the statue was treated as an evocation of impact—as a portrayal of literal, rather than figurative, violence. They thought that I was trying to say something about the people they lost. You don't even know my father.

How dare you try telling me how I feel about my father? He said, 'You don't understand. I'm getting bomb threats. Photographs lie. Even great photographs. Especially great photographs. The Falling Man in Richard Drew's picture fell in the manner suggested by the photograph for only a fraction of a second, and then kept falling.

The photograph functioned as a study of doomed verticality, a fantasia of straight lines, with a human being slivered at the center, like a spike. In truth, however, the Falling Man fell with neither the precision of an arrow nor the grace of an Olympic diver. He fell like everyone else, like all the other jumpers—trying to hold on to the life he was leaving, which is to say that he fell desperately, inelegantly.

In Drew's famous photograph, his humanity is in accord with the lines of the buildings. In the rest of the sequence—the eleven outtakes—his humanity stands apart. He is not augmented by aesthetics; he is merely human, and his humanity, startled and in some cases horizontal, obliterates everything else in the frame.

In the complete sequence of photographs, truth is subordinate to the facts that emerge slowly, pitilessly, frame by frame. In the sequence, the Falling Man shows his face to the camera in the two frames before the published one, and after that there is an unveiling, nearly an unpeeling, as the force generated by the fall rips the white jacket off his back.

The facts that emerge from the entire sequence suggest that the Toronto reporter, Peter Cheney, got some things right in his effort to solve the mystery presented by Drew's published photo. The Falling Man has a dark cast to his skin and wears a goatee. He is probably a food-service worker. He seems lanky, with the length and narrowness of his face—like that of a medieval Christ—possibly accentuated by the push of the wind and the pull of gravity.

But seventy-nine people died on the morning of September 11 after going to work at Windows on the World. Another twenty-one died while in the employ of Forte Food, a catering service that fed the traders at Cantor Fitzgerald. Many of the dead were Latino, or light-skinned black men, or Indian, or Arab.

Many had dark hair cut short. Many had mustaches and goatees. Indeed, to anyone trying to figure out the identity of the Falling Man, the few salient characteristics that can be discerned in the original series of photographs raise as many possibilities as they exclude.

There is, however, one fact that is decisive. Whoever the Falling Man may be, he was wearing a bright-orange shirt under his white top. It is the one inarguable fact that the brute force of the fall reveals. No one can know if the tunic or shirt, open at the back, is being pulled away from him, or if the fall is simply tearing the white fabric to pieces. But anyone can see he is wearing an orange shirt.

If they saw these pictures, members of his family would be able to see that he is wearing an orange shirt. They might even be able to remember if he owned an orange shirt, if he was the kind of guy who would own an orange shirt, if he wore an orange shirt to work that morning.

Surely they would; surely someone would remember what he was wearing when he went to work on the last morning of his life But now the Falling Man is falling through more than the blank blue sky. He is falling through the vast spaces of memory and picking up speed. He never came home. His wife, Christy Ferer, won't talk about any of the particulars of his death.

She is a close friend of Eric Fischl's, as was her husband, so when the artist asked, she agreed to take a look at Tumbling Woman. It, in her words, "hit me in the gut," but she felt that Fischl had the right to create and exhibit it.

Now she's come to the conclusion that the controversy may have been largely a matter of timing. Maybe it was just too soon to show something like that. After all, not long before her husband died, she traveled with him to Auschwitz, where piles of confiscated eyeglasses and extracted tooth fillings are on exhibit. They couldn't show things like that then …. In fact, they did, at least in photographic form, and the pictures that came out of the death camps of Europe were treated as essential acts of witness, without particular regard to the sensitivities of those who appeared in them or the surviving families of the dead.

They were shown, as Richard Drew's photographs of the freshly assassinated Robert Kennedy were shown. They were shown, as the photographs of Ethel Kennedy pleading with photographers not to take photographs were shown. They were shown as the photograph of the little Vietnamese girl running naked after a napalm attack was shown. They were shown as the photograph of Father Mychal Judge, graphically and unmistakably dead, was shown, and accepted as a kind of testament.

They were shown as everything is shown, for, like the lens of a camera, history is a force that does not discriminate. What distinguishes the pictures of the jumpers from the pictures that have come before is that we—we Americans—are being asked to discriminate on their behalf. What distinguishes them, historically, is that we, as patriotic Americans, have agreed not to look at them.

Dozens, scores, maybe hundreds of people died by leaping from a burning building, and we have somehow taken it upon ourselves to deem their deaths unworthy of witness—because we have somehow deemed the act of witness, in this one regard, unworthy of us.

Catherine Hernandez never saw the photo the reporter carried under his arm at her father's funeral. Neither did her mother, Eulogia. Her sister Jacqueline did, and her outrage assured that the reporter left—was forcibly evicted—before he did any more damage. But the picture has followed Catherine and Eulogia and the entire Hernandez family.

There was nothing more important to Norberto Hernandez than family. His motto: "Together Forever. The picture split them. Those who knew , right away, that the picture was not Norberto—his wife and his daughters—have become estranged from those who pondered the possibility that it was him for the benefit of a reporter's notepad.

With Norberto alive, the extended family all lived in the same neighborhood in Queens. Now Eulogia and her daughters have moved to a house on Long Island because Tatiana—who is now sixteen and who bears a resemblance to Norberto Hernandez: the wide face, the dark brows, the thick dark lips, thinly smiling—kept seeing visions of her father in the house and kept hearing the whispered suggestions that he died by jumping out a window.

He could not have died by jumping out a window. All over the world, people who read Peter Cheney's story believe that Norberto died by jumping out a window. People have written poems about Norberto jumping out a window. People have called the Hernandezes with offers of money—either charity or payment for interviews—because they read about Norberto jumping out a window. But he couldn't have jumped out a window, his family knows, because he wouldn't have jumped out a window: not Papi.

She is sitting on a couch next to her mother, who is caramel-colored, with coppery hair tied close to her scalp, and who is wearing a cotton dress checked with the color of the sky.

Eulogia speaks half the time in determined English, and then, when she gets frustrated with the rate of revelation, pours rapid-fire Spanish into the ear of her daughter, who translates. She says that she could see him thinking about us. I know that sounds strange, but she knew him. They were together since they were fifteen. The Norberto Hernandez she knew would have endured any pain before he jumped out of a window.

When the Norberto Hernandez she knew died, his eyes were fixed on what he saw in his heart—the faces of his wife and his daughters—and not on the terrible beauty of an empty sky. How well did she know him? That morning, I remember. He wore Old Navy underwear. He wore black socks. He wore blue pants: jeans. He wore a Casio watch. He wore an Old Navy shirt. With checks.

He wore a white jacket. Drew, an AP photographer, had been shooting a maternity fashion show for New York Fashion Week in Bryant Park, in the city's midtown area, when he received a tip from a CNN cameraman that a plane had just crashed into the north tower of the Twin Towers.

Sixteen minutes later, another would strike the south tower. What he saw when he emerged, one block from the World Trade Centre, was utter mayhem. Both buildings were on fire. Smoke filled the air. He had no idea a second plane had hit until he was standing between a police officer and an Emergency Medical Technician EMT.

At first onlookers thought it was debris; American Airlines Flight 11 had crashed into the building only a few minutes before. It was 8. Logozzo was with co-workers on the 72nd floor of the south tower when the plane hit. Many survivors of that day still say the bodies falling from the sky were one of their most haunting memories. The north tower held for minutes after the plane hit. People jumped constantly, consistently, through that entire time.

Most jumped from the north tower; a handful from the south. It took just 10 seconds to fall. They weren't unconscious as they fell, but death was instant. Some jumped alone. Kennedy's wife approached Drew and the other photographers. You know, like, 'Don't, please, don't take pictures of that. Dickerson asked, "When you made the 'Falling Man' picture, did you know that you had done something extraordinary?

Drew said, "I didn't take the picture. The camera took the picture of the falling man. And when these people were falling, I would then put my finger on the trigger of the camera and I'd hold the camera up, and I'd photograph and follow them going down, and then the camera would open and close and take the pictures as they were going down. I have, I think, eight or nine frames of this gentleman falling, and the camera just happened to cycle in that time when he was completely vertical.

I didn't see that picture really until I got back to the office and then started looking at my stuff on my laptop. I didn't see it. I didn't know that the building, the first building had collapsed because I was looking at it through a telephoto lens. And I'm only seeing a piece of whatever's going on.



0コメント

  • 1000 / 1000