9/11: 10 Years: Falling Man

From Yahoo News:
"Photographer behind 9/11 "Falling Man" retraces steps, recalls "unknown soldier""

Richard Drew put down his camera bag and looked up at the colossal skyscraper that seemed to be racing toward the clouds at an accelerated clip.But he had nevertheless returned to retrace his steps for the first time since Sept. 11, 2001, when he had watched dozens die through the lens of a Nikon DCS620. On that similarly brilliant morning a decade ago, two planes had crashed into the Twin Towers by the time Drew emerged from the Chambers Street subway stop around a quarter after nine. The 110-story buildings looked like a pair of giant smokestacks spewing plumes of black soot into the crystal blue sky. He began shooting, focusing on the topmost floors. It wasn't long before he realized that some of the people trapped inside -- as many as 200 of them, it was later estimated -- had decided that plunging thousands of feet to their deaths was preferable to burning alive. "There's one. There's another one," he said, recalling the horrific scene with a detached ease. "I just started photographing people as they were falling." One of those people would come to be known as the Falling Man. Though his identity remains unconfirmed, some believe he was Jonathan Briley, a 43-year-old sound engineer who worked in a restaurant on the top floor of the North Tower. The man fell at 9:41, and Drew caught about a dozen frames of his fatal descent. In one of them, the subject soars earthward in a graceful vertical dive -- arms at his sides; left leg bent at the knee. "Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it," wrote Tom Junod in a renowned 2003 Esquire piece that coined the title of the photo, which won a 2001 World Press Photo award and is the subject of a 2006 documentary film. "If he were not falling, he might very well be flying." Newspapers the world over made space for the Falling Man in their Sept. 12, 2001, editions. But the widespread publicity sparked a debate as to whether the image was too gratuitous for public consumption. "To me, it's a real quiet photograph," Drew argued. Unlike fellow AP photographer Nick Ut's Pulitzer-winning 1972 shot of a naked 9-year-old girl fleeing a napalm attack in Vietnam or Drew's famous photos of Bobby Kennedy's bloody dying breaths, "There's no violence in it," he said.

^ I have seen the picture of the Falling Man and it is extremely sad. You can only imagine what the person is thinking as he knows he is going to die. I guess he had a choice to make: either wait for the fire in the World Trade Center to kill him or jump. I don't know what I would do if I was ever in that situation - I just hope I never have to find out. ^

http://news.yahoo.com/photographer-behind-9-11-falling-man-retraces-steps-recalls-unknown-soldier.html;_ylt=Ag4BIzslVvNKUa4auV1xYt_Qc.J_;_ylu=X3oDMTNucWNrMzBl