Opinion: Perceiving images, imaging perception
By Pramod K Nayar One of the most celebrated photographs that had the (mis)fortune to be withdrawn from official exhibits was Richard Drew’s “Falling Man”. Drew, entirely by accident, captured the man falling/leaping off the World Trade Centre (WTC) on 9/11. Drew’s photograph along with other photographs of people jumping/falling from the Towers, were later […]
By Pramod K Nayar
One of the most celebrated photographs that had the (mis)fortune to be withdrawn from official exhibits was Richard Drew’s “Falling Man”. Drew, entirely by accident, captured the man falling/leaping off the World Trade Centre (WTC) on 9/11. Drew’s photograph along with other photographs of people jumping/falling from the Towers, were later banished from public displays and reproductions. ABC News took the decision not to broadcast images of bodies plummeting, as did the NBC which showed one such falling body and then stopped.
Yet the image became iconic, figuring in Don De Lillo’s 9/11 novel, Falling Man, besides sculptures like Eric Fischl’s sculptor Tumbling Woman (2002) and Sharon Paz’s Falling (2002), and a parody in Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, a graphic board book on 9/11.
Protecting Privacy
The ostensible reason to not exhibit Drew’s and others’ images was that it violated the privacy of the individuals who had fallen/jumped (there was the image of the couple holding hands as they jumped to their deaths as well), and their loved ones who mourned them.
This was a rather fallacious argument, since 9/11 produced, by invitation of the state itself, acres of expression of private grief and signs of mourning by individuals and families. It was one of the events that took personal and private mourning and transformed it into a national spectacle.
Commentators spoke of a ‘cultural resistance’ to these photographs, along with the official ban on images of death and dismemberment, leading the critic Stephen Prince to observe:
The carnage on the streets below the towers, with hundreds of burst and shattered bodies strewn about the pavement, has never been written about or substantively photographed.
The tension between capitalising, for various purposes, upon the destruction and death in New York, and on ensuring grief was kept personal remained, evidently, unresolved as the USA went on create a massive The September 11 Digital Archive. In this Archive, the Drew photograph is not available in the original: what is available is a pencil drawing of the ‘falling man’, as though this was an acceptable image. In the televisual war — by which I mean both, the War on Terror that was televised as nothing else before, and the war over images, from WTC to Abu Ghraib — that followed, evidently, the privacy of the man who asserted agency by leaping to certain death was to be guarded while the destruction of the Towers was to be employed for maximum effect.
The falling man became subsumed, ironically, in the collective imaginary produced through an iconography of destruction where one man’s death became irrelevant.
Iconography of Destruction
The point perhaps was not about the privacy of the individual or private grief. It was about the influence and effect of the image on human behaviour, particularly American. In any case, the images of the destruction had been repeatedly circulated globally in such a way that it became the most televised images of the modern world, leading the philosopher Jacques Derrida to write:
What would “September 11” have been without television. . . . Maximum media coverage was in the common interest of the perpetrators of “September 11,” the terrorists, and those who, in the name of the victims, wanted to declare “war on terrorism.
But the larger question in a discussion of this imagery of destruction is: what uses were the supposedly horrific and saddening images put to in the War on Terror? Answer: the images were key players in the manufacturing of opinion in favour of the War on Terror.
A virtual memorial titled ‘Remember’ was posted soon after 9/11 by a pastor, Tony Mavrakos, which drew the Twin Towers as the twin tablets of the Ten Commandments. In an astonishing move Mavrakos said:
We are providing this picture FREE so you can get it into people’s hands, homes and hearts. This is the actual skyline of New York City where the Twin Towers once stood. They’re gone but standing where they once stood are two other Twin Towers that no one can take down, including terrorists, the American judicial system, the ACLU or the American Atheists: the Ten Commandments.
Such rhetoric clearly signalled the recasting of America’s war on Iraq, Bin Laden and Afghanistan as a ‘holy war’ rather than a political war one, and thereby positioning it very differently from its previous neocolonial wars.
Bioterrorist Threats
In an exhibit about the destruction of the Towers, Kevin Clarke and Mikey Flowers in 9/11 Ashes to Ashes, Dust to DNA, a photo collage, the ruins are overlaid with the DNA code. Art theorist WJT Mitchell comments:
This image evokes the longing for traces and relics of the victims that was so vividly evident in innumerable informal memorials that attached themselves to the site… But it recodes this longing as a desire for literal biological reanimation, just the reverse of the funerary liturgy, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust”.
There were indeed massive efforts at DNA collection and identification of the dead at Ground Zero after 9/11, and this is no doubt captured in the Clarke-Flowers image (Flowers is a medical technician). But it also performed another, less benign, function.
The image was an invocation of bioterrorist threats that America had obsessed about for some time, and which 9/11 reopened for public consumption. Thus, Clarke and Flowers were employing the destruction of the WTC to signal another form of terrorism, effectively ramping up the anxiety levels of the American.
The iconography of destruction is then a political one. It mobilised, in the wake of 9/11, jingoism and nationalist sentiment, and energised a policy that divided the world into us/them in which the ‘us’ was always a victim and the ‘them’ was the evil perpetrator.
The battle over images is a battle over perception: because images tell us how to perceive history.
(The author is Professor, Department of English, University of Hyderabad)
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