Sister of person believed to be 9/11 Falling Man can no longer look at infamous image
In the midst of the smoke, fire, and wreckage of the September 11 attacks, one image showed a strange serenity in one man who was killed.
After the planes hit the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11 2001 people trapped on the upper floors of the skyscrapers began to fall, some driven out by smoke, flames, and wind, others potentially making the unimaginable decision to take their final moments into their own hands.
It is believed that between 50 and 200 people fell from the towers. Associated Press Richard Drew was among those who captured their falls from the towers, many tumbling chaotically downwards.
Among the pictures there was one which showed a man falling headfirst with just the backdrop of the tower behind him. In that brief moment the man, who has never been officially identified, appears almost at peace.
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Drew captured the photo at 9:41am and 15 seconds on 11 September 2001, and has become one of the most enduring images of the attacks, becoming known as Falling Man.
The photo captured attention over its seemingly calm and meditative appearance, not directly showing any of the chaos and carnage that was unfolding just out of shot.
It was shared in the days after the atrocity, but proved to be so controversial that many newspapers including the New York Times stopped circulating it as readers had written in to share that the image was too difficult to look at.
The man in the photo
One of the people who found the picture particularly difficult was Gwen Briley-Strand, the sister of Jonathan Briley, who was killed in the September 11 attacks and who it is believed may be the man in the photograph, though this has never been officially confirmed.
Briley-Strand told the Daily Mail that she no longer looks at the photo.
"The photograph brought so much pain to so many people when they were trying to figure out who this person was," she said.
"I remember hearing about a family who were deeply religious and, with Catholicism, this man that jumped, that's suicide and that's the unforgivable sin."
She added: "I don't believe in an unforgivable sin. God is too benevolent. He's too wonderful. I think the only unforgivable sin is not to believe in Him."
New York's medical examiners office specifically did not refer to the people who fell from the buildings as 'jumpers', reasoning that those people had not gone into work intending to jump to their deaths, but had been forced to. All of the deaths in the September 11 attacks were ruled as homicides.
Why was the photo controversial?
Years later in 2023, Drew would open up about the criticism of the picture, including people who said that it had showed the man's death, and explained why he believed people had found the image so evocative and painful.
"But it wasn’t his death," he told Quill. "It was the last moments of his life."
He added: "As a photojournalist, I chronicle people’s lives. This was part of the man’s life. I think people were upset because the photo looked so … quiet. It didn’t show actual violence, which we’d gotten numb to by then."
Drew had even previously said that he had got the picture entirely by chance, with several other frames of the same man showing him not in the same position.
"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," Drew told CBS News in 2021. "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."
He added: "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."
Kit Roberts