'He was you and me.' AP photographer Richard Drew reflects on his picture of a man falling from the World Trade Center's north tower following the Sept. 11 attacks. The unidentified man has been referred to as '9/11's Unknown Soldier.'
I look at it from my own angle. I was below the north tower that morning, on the corner of West and Vesey streets. The smoke was so thick, it was tough to see and tougher to breathe. Rubble was falling, and when I heard the first of a series of loud cracks, I thought it was the sound of concrete debris striking the ground. But I was wrong. It was the sound of human beings hitting the pavement.
I have photographed dying. As a 21-year-old rookie photographer on a supposedly routine assignment, I was standing behind Robert F. Kennedy when he was assassinated. That time, there was no telephoto lens to distance me. I was so close that his blood spattered onto my jacket. I saw the life bleed out of him, and I heard Ethel’s screams. Pictures that, shot through my tears, still distress me after 35 years. But nobody refused to print them, as they did the 9/11 photo. Nobody looked away.
As my anxieties abated, I continued to wonder why people reacted so differently to the photos of RFK and the World Trade Center. In the World Trade Center photo, it’s about personal identification. We felt we knew Bobby Kennedy, but we didn’t identify with him. We weren’t wealthy scions of a political dynasty or presidential candidates. We were just ordinary people who had to show up for work, day after day, more often than not in tall office buildings.That’s what unsettles people about the picture. We look at it and we put ourselves in the jumper’s place.
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