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

They fell alone. They fell together. 

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. 

People 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, people trapped on top floors crowded around broken windows as smoke and heat encroached. 

As many 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.

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 later, 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.

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 about 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 make?

Some whose lives were changed by the photo’s long afterlife – the veteran photographer who shot it, the magazine writer who helped canonize it as the “unknown soldier” of 9/11, the family of a man often identified as the possible 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 about it for Esquire in 2003, recently told USA TODAY. “And then you have people saying, ‘Every year I am accosted by this horror. Please make it stop.'”

More: The 9/11 attacks hit 25 years ago. They’re still shaping our lives

A photo taken quickly among chaos

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

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

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

“A plane’s hit the World Trade Center,” he said. 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. People had gathered at the windows, hoping for rescue, as smoke and fire raged, cutting off exits. Witnesses on the streets realized that among the falling debris were people.

“Look at that,” Drew recalled an emergency medical worker pointing out. 

One Morgan Stanley worker on the 72nd floor of the south tower told 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 people jumped to their deaths from the upper floors, many 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 people 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 started collapsing, a first responder pulled him away toward safety.

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

“We’re seeing him in the last moments of his life,” Drew said.

Later that day, the photo hit the wire. A family friend who worked at a Colorado newspaper saw it and phoned Drew’s wife, who had been waiting to hear from him amid 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, said in the film.

The photo ran the next day, in Allentown and across the country, 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.

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The photo’s enduring power comes partly from capturing a final moment, said 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 told USA TODAY at the time. “These people were forced out by the smoke and flames or blown out.”

The public reaction to Drew’s photo meant it largely disappeared from view, something less likely 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.

For Drew, who spent countless hours at Ground Zero, 9/11 remains a traumatic day. He said he battled post-traumatic stress in the years that followed. “It messed me up pretty bad,” he wrote in a reflection for the 20th anniversary. His daughter, who had been on a school bus that rode by the Twin Towers that day, still calls him on the anniversary just to say she loves him.

Drew has written that his colleagues call his shot “the most famous photo nobody has seen.”

But Drew’s photo wasn’t the only visual representation of falling victims to become taboo.

Artist Eric Fischl, a Long Island artist inspired by the falling man photo, created a sculpture called “Tumbling Woman” after 9/11. He said wanted to address the human loss of an attack that had taken a friend of his.

When his piece was displayed at Rockefeller Center, a wave of complaints forced the property’s owners to remove it quickly. The public wasn’t ready for it, Fischl said. He went on to create several other versions, one of which is in the Whitney museum.

It’s still not publicly displayed, he said.

Who was the Falling Man?

The day after the Sept. 11 attack, journalist Tom Junod woke up early and drove to the Shelter Island Pharmacy, on eastern Long Island, to buy a raft of newspapers, including the New York Times.

“I opened it, and there on page seven was Richard Drew’s photograph,” he recalled. “The second I saw it, I knew I had to write about it.”

In 2003, the identity of the falling man remained unclear. Junod was determined to find out who he was.

The Toronto Globe and Mail had already published a story identifying the falling man as Norberto Hernandez, a pastry chef at the World Trade center’s Windows on the World restaurant, based on interviews with two of his relatives. The story noted that other family members disagreed.

Junod approached the family and learned the episode had caused them tremendous pain – in part because Hernandez’s family’s religion viewed suicide as a mortal sin, one of his family members said in a documentary interview. Hernandez’s wife insisted he would never choose to leap to his death and instead would do everything he could to return to his family.

Junod and an Esquire staff researcher cold-called other possible families, bracing for an angry reaction to his quest to identify the man.

“I expected at least people to just start yelling at me and get me off the phone, but it wasn’t like that at all,” he said. “They wanted to know.”

Junod examined Drew’s outtakes – additional frames that showed the falling man, mid-tumble, bringing new perspective to the arrow-like image. One showed more detail, an orange undershirt. 

Clues led Junod to Jonathan Briley, an audio engineer at Windows on the World. He had the same build, the same black high-top sneakers his family said he wore. Briley also had severe asthma, which would have made heavy smoke unbearable.

In the days after 9/11, Briley’s sister, Gwendolyn Briley-Strand, joined her family in putting up missing persons flyers of her brother. Briley, 43, was a gentle man and a church deacon. They’d recently spent a week in Daytona Beach, Florida, together. 

He loved getting to work early to watch the sunrise from the 106th floor. 

Her father, a minister, prayed that God would connect him with his son. The following day, 11 days after the attacks, the coroner called to say they’d identified his son’s remains. 

Briley-Strand said one of her brothers identified his remains. The family recovered a wedding ring, ID and pager. And her brother’s black tennis shoe.

The condition of her brother’s remains left some in Briley’s family wondering whether he could have been the falling man, she said. 

Junod’s story, published in the fall of 2003, conceded it could be Briley. But Junod’s wider point was that the identity of the falling man didn’t matter. This “unknown soldier” captured the trauma of a nation, in an attack where 40% of victims were never identified.

“I wanted to give them an out if they didn’t want to believe it,” Junod said.

Twenty five years later, Briley-Strand said she, too, is more interested in honoring victims, no matter what choice they made that day.

“Whether it was Jonathan or not,” she said, “this particular man made the choice to take his life in his hands and leap into the arms of God.”

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The Falling Man’s place in history

In an empty plaza where the towers once stood, visitors descend 70 feet into the memorial museum at Ground Zero. Among the exhibits is an entrance into a discreet alcove.

There, at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, a handful of projected images of people falling from the towers appear and then fade against a wall. Among them is Drew’s photo of the falling man. Accompanying them are searing eyewitness statements.

The impermanence of the images reflects the sensitivity that surrounds the photo to this day, said Ramirez, the museum’s curator.

“We fought long and hard, and had a lot of conversations with our stakeholder advisory group about whether we should include any of the images of the people who fell to their death,” she said.

The museum decided it was important to reflect that as many as 200 people were faced with what she called a “choiceless choice, this inconceivable predicament.”

A quarter century has dampened the fiery criticism surrounding the photo’s publication and the unknown identity of the man in it. Falling victim images are still discussed on Reddit pages. On anniversaries, Junod said people tell him they re-read his story and revisit the image online.

While some still blanch at the photo, Drew, now 79 and still working for AP, knows his work helped others find peace. One man came to him, searching for his missing fiancée, a Cantor Fitzgerald brokerage employee. They went through Drew’s photos of falling victims together and found her. The man thanked Drew, relieved to find closure.

He has often thought about why the public recoiled from the falling man photo but didn’t look away from his graphic pictures of RFK’s assassination, or other famous shots from foreign wars.

He thinks part of the answer is that, in the falling man, we see ourselves – and the impossible choice of everyday people who lost their lives. 

For that, he’s glad the photo endures.

Chris Kenning is a national correspondent for USA TODAY. Reach him at ckenning@usatoday.com.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Why this photographer’s 9/11 ‘Falling Man’ photo remains controversial