Sep 09, · But the only certainty we have is the certainty we had at the start: At fifteen seconds after a.m., on September 11, , a photographer named Sep 19, · September 11, is the most destructive day in the long bloody history of rebel terrorism. The casualties and the economic damage were unprecedented. It could be the most important day too. President Bush declared a “war” to eliminate terror, (2) galvanizing a response that could reshape the international world Aug 25, · On September 11, , at a.m. on a clear Tuesday morning, an American Airlines Boeing loaded with 20, gallons of jet fuel crashed
Blueprinting: Using the Thesis Paragraph to Plan Your Essay | Jerz's Literacy Weblog (est. )
Do you remember this photograph? In the United States, people have taken pains to banish it from the record of September 11, The story behind it, though, september 11 2001 essay the search for the man pictured in it, are our most intimate connection to the horror of that day. I n the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow. Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it.
If he were not falling, he might very well be flying, september 11 2001 essay. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air, september 11 2001 essay. He appears comfortable in the grip of unimaginable motion. He does not appear intimidated by gravity's divine suction or by what awaits him. His arms are by his side, only slightly outriggered. His left leg is bent at the knee, almost casually.
His white shirt, or jacket, september 11 2001 essay, or frock, is billowing free of his black pants. His black high-tops are still on his feet. In all the other pictures, the people who did what he did—who jumped—appear to be struggling against horrific discrepancies of scale.
They are made puny by the backdrop september 11 2001 essay the towers, which loom like colossi, and then by the event itself. Some of them are shirtless; their shoes fly off as they flail and fall; they look confused, as though trying to swim down the side of a september 11 2001 essay. The man in the picture, by contrast, september 11 2001 essay, is perfectly vertical, and so is in accord with the lines september 11 2001 essay the buildings behind him.
He splits them, bisects them: Everything to the left of him in the picture is the North Tower; everything to the right, the South. Though oblivious to the geometric balance he has achieved, he is the essential element in the creation of a new flag, a banner composed entirely of steel bars shining in the sun. Some people who look at the picture see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation; others see something else—something discordant and therefore terrible: freedom.
There is something almost rebellious in the man's posture, as though once faced with the inevitability of death, he decided to get on with it; as though he were a missile, a spear, bent on attaining his own end.
He is, fifteen seconds past a. EST, the moment the picture is taken, in the clutches of pure physics, accelerating at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared.
He will soon be traveling at upwards of miles per hour, and he is upside down. In the september 11 2001 essay, he is frozen; in his life outside the frame, he drops and keeps dropping until he disappears. The photographer is no stranger to history; he knows it is something that happens later.
In the actual moment history is made, it is usually made in terror and confusion, and so it is up to people like him—paid witnesses—to have the presence of mind to attend to its manufacture. The photographer has that presence of mind and has had it since he was a young man. When he was twenty-one years old, he september 11 2001 essay standing right behind Bobby Kennedy when Bobby Kennedy was shot in the head.
His jacket was spattered with Kennedy's blood, but he jumped on a table and shot pictures of Kennedy's open and ebbing eyes, and then of Ethel Kennedy crouching over her husband and begging photographers—begging him—not to take pictures. Richard Drew has never done that. Although he has preserved the jacket patterned with Kennedy's blood, he has never not taken a picture, september 11 2001 essay, never averted his eye. He works for the Associated Press, september 11 2001 essay.
He is a journalist. It is not up to him to reject the images that fill his frame, because one never knows september 11 2001 essay history is made until one makes it. It is not even up to him to distinguish if a body is alive or dead, because the camera makes no such distinctions, and he is in the business of shooting bodies, as all photographers are, unless they are Ansel Adams.
Indeed, he was shooting bodies on the morning of September 11, On assignment for the AP, september 11 2001 essay, he was shooting a maternity fashion show in Bryant Park, notable, he says, "because it featured actual pregnant models. He wore glasses. He was sparse in the scalp, gray in the beard, hard in the head. In a lifetime of taking pictures, he has found a way to be both mild-mannered and brusque, patient and very, very quick. He was doing what he always does at fashion shows—"staking out real estate"—when a CNN cameraman with an earpiece said that a plane had crashed into the North Tower, and Drew's editor rang his cell phone.
He packed his equipment into a bag and gambled on taking the subway downtown, september 11 2001 essay. Although it was still running, he was the only one on it. He got out at the Chambers Street station and saw that both towers had been turned into smokestacks. Staking out his real estate, he walked west, to where ambulances were gathering, because rescue workers "usually won't throw you out.
People on the ground were gasping because people in the building were jumping. He started shooting pictures through a mm lens. He was standing between a cop and an emergency technician, and each time one of them cried, "There goes another," his camera found a falling body and followed it down for a nine- or twelve-shot sequence.
He shot ten or fifteen of them before he heard the rumbling of the South Tower and witnessed, through the winnowing exclusivity of his lens, its collapse. He was engulfed in a mobile ruin, but september 11 2001 essay grabbed a mask from an ambulance and photographed the top of the North Tower "exploding like a mushroom" and raining debris.
He discovered that there is such a thing as being too close, and, deciding that he had fulfilled his professional obligations, Richard Drew joined the throng of ashen humanity heading north, walking until he reached his office at Rockefeller Center. There is something september 11 2001 essay rebellious in the man's posture, as though once faced with the inevitability of death, he decided to get on with it. There was no terror or confusion at the Associated Press.
There was, instead, that feeling of history being manufactured; although the office was as crowded as he'd ever seen it, there was, instead, "the wonderful calm that comes into play when people are really doing their jobs.
He didn't look at any of the other pictures in the sequence; he didn't have to. That picture just jumped off the screen because of its verticality and symmetry. It just had that look. He sent the image to the AP's server. The next morning, it appeared on page seven of The New York Times.
It appeared in hundreds of newspapers, all over the country, all over the world. The man inside the frame—the Falling Man—was not identified. They began jumping not long after the first plane hit the North Tower, september 11 2001 essay long after the fire started, september 11 2001 essay.
They kept jumping until the tower fell. They jumped through windows already broken and then, later, through windows they broke themselves.
They jumped to escape the smoke and the fire; they jumped when the ceilings fell and the floors collapsed; they jumped just to breathe once more before they died. They jumped continually, from all four sides of the building, and from all september 11 2001 essay above and around the building's fatal wound.
For more than an hour and a half, they streamed from the building, one after another, consecutively rather than en masse, september 11 2001 essay, as if each individual required the sight of another individual jumping before mustering the courage to jump himself or herself. One photograph, taken at a distance, shows people jumping in perfect sequence, like parachutists, forming an arc composed of three plummeting people, evenly spaced. Indeed, there were reports that some tried parachuting, before the force generated by their fall ripped the drapes, the tablecloths, the desperately gathered fabric, from their hands.
They were all, obviously, very much alive on their way down, and their way down lasted an approximate count of ten seconds. They were all, obviously, not just killed when they landed but destroyed, in body though not, september 11 2001 essay, one prays, in soul.
One hit a fireman on the ground and killed him; the fireman's body was anointed by Father Mychal Judge, september 11 2001 essay, whose own death, shortly thereafter, was september 11 2001 essay as an example of martyrdom after the photograph—the redemptive tableau—of firefighters carrying his body from the rubble made its way around the world.
From the beginning, the spectacle of doomed people september 11 2001 essay from the upper floors of the World Trade Center resisted redemption.
They were called "jumpers" or "the jumpers," as though they represented a new lemminglike class. The trial that hundreds endured in the building and then in the air became its own kind of trial for the thousands watching them from the ground.
No one ever got used to it; no one who saw it wished to see it again, although, of course, many saw it again. Each jumper, no matter how many there were, brought fresh horror, elicited shock, tested the spirit, struck a lasting blow. Those tumbling september 11 2001 essay the air remained, by all accounts, eerily silent; those on the ground screamed.
It was the sight of the jumpers that prompted Rudy Giuliani to say to his police commissioner, "We're in uncharted waters now. Save their souls! They're jumping! Oh, please God! In most American Newspapersthe photograph that Richard Drew took of the Falling Man ran once and never again.
Papers all over the country, from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram to the Memphis Commercial Appeal to The Denver Postwere forced to defend themselves against charges that they exploited a man's death, stripped him of his dignity, invaded his privacy, turned tragedy into leering pornography. Most letters of complaint stated the obvious: that someone seeing the picture had to know who it was. Still, even as Drew's photograph became at once iconic and impermissible, its subject remained unnamed.
An editor at the Toronto Globe and Mail assigned a reporter named Peter Cheney to september 11 2001 essay the mystery. Cheney at first despaired of his task; the entire city, after all, was wallpapered with Kinkoed flyers advertising the faces of the missing and the lost and the dead.
Then he applied himself, sending the digital photograph to a shop that clarified and september 11 2001 essay it. Now information emerged: It appeared to him that the man was most likely not black but dark-skinned, september 11 2001 essay, probably Latino. He wore a goatee. And the white shirt billowing from his black pants was not a shirt but rather appeared to be a tunic of some sort, the kind of jacket a restaurant worker wears.
Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of the North Tower, lost seventy-nine of its employees on September 11, as well as ninety-one of its patrons. It was likely that the Falling Man numbered among them. But which one was he? Over dinner, Cheney spent an evening discussing this question with friends, then said goodnight and walked through Times Square. It was after midnight, eight days after the attacks. The missing posters were still everywhere, but Cheney was able to focus on one that seemed to present itself to him—a poster portraying a man who worked at Windows as a pastry chef, who was dressed in a white tunic, who wore a goatee, who was Latino.
9/11 Timeline: The Attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City - History
, time: 4:57September 11 Attacks: Facts, Background & Impact - HISTORY
Aug 25, · On September 11, , at a.m. on a clear Tuesday morning, an American Airlines Boeing loaded with 20, gallons of jet fuel crashed Sep 11, · Sample Essay on 9/11 World Trade Center Attack. Posted on September 11, The morning of September 11, has become the tragedy for all Americans. There was a terrorist attack, as four airliners were hijacked by al-Qaeda members. Four suicide attacks were targeted at important objects in the USA Sep 19, · September 11, is the most destructive day in the long bloody history of rebel terrorism. The casualties and the economic damage were unprecedented. It could be the most important day too. President Bush declared a “war” to eliminate terror, (2) galvanizing a response that could reshape the international world
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