6. “The Falling Man” caught a glimpse of desperation during one of the United States’ greatest tragedies.
Richard Drew, a photographer for the Associated Press was on assignment on the morning of September 11, 2001, taking photos at a maternity fashion shoot, when he was informed of a plane hitting one of the Twin Towers. He immediately left and took the subway across the city. By the time he arrived the second plane had struck the second tower. As he stood between a policeman and an emergency technician and watched the horror unfold he witnessed people jumping to their deaths from the burning towers.
Drew pointed his camera at a man falling to his death and took nine to twelve shots. He had taken approximately ten to fifteen more of these type of sequence shots of people falling to their deaths when the South Tower collapsed. He grabbed a mask from a nearby ambulance and continued to take pictures. He captured the North Tower exploding and raining down debris on those on the ground. Drew decided it was too dangerous to stay any longer and made his way back to the Associated Press newsroom where he viewed the images he had captured on that fateful morning.
The frame showing a man falling upside down stood out from all the others captured that morning. It was an image that immortalised the desperation of the situation for those trapped at the top of the Twin Towers after the attack. They were faced with a horrible dilemma, where jumping was the lesser of the two evils. The photo appeared in The New York Times the following day and featured in hundreds of newspapers both nationally and internationally. There has been much speculation as to the identity of the Falling Man but he has never been formally identified. He is believed to be Jonathon Briley, who worked on the 106th Floor of the North Tower for Windows of the World.