![]() ![]() It is not up to him to reject the images that fill his frame, because one never knows when history is made until one makes it. Although he has preserved the jacket patterned with Kennedy's blood, he has never not taken a picture, never averted his eye. ![]() 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. When he was twenty-one years old, he was standing right behind Bobby Kennedy when Bobby Kennedy was shot in the head. The photographer has that presence of mind and has had it since he was a young man. 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 is no stranger to history he knows it is something that happens later. In the picture, he is frozen in his life outside the frame, he drops and keeps dropping until he disappears. He will soon be traveling at upwards of 150 miles per hour, and he is upside down. EST, the moment the picture is taken, in the clutches of pure physics, accelerating at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared. 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. Some people who look at the picture see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation others see something else-something discordant and therefore terrible: freedom. 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. He splits them, bisects them: Everything to the left of him in the picture is the North Tower everything to the right, the South. The man in the picture, by contrast, is perfectly vertical, and so is in accord with the lines of the buildings behind him. 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 mountain. ![]() They are made puny by the backdrop of the towers, which loom like colossi, and then by the event itself. In all the other pictures, the people who did what he did-who jumped-appear to be struggling against horrific discrepancies of scale. ![]() His black high-tops are still on his feet. His white shirt, or jacket, or frock, is billowing free of his black pants. His left leg is bent at the knee, almost casually. His arms are by his side, only slightly outriggered. He does not appear intimidated by gravity's divine suction or by what awaits him. He appears comfortable in the grip of unimaginable motion. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. If he were not falling, he might very well be flying. Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it. I n the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow. The story behind it, though, and the search for the man pictured in it, are our most intimate connection to the horror of that day. Do you remember this photograph? In the United States, people have taken pains to banish it from the record of September 11, 2001. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |