The story behind the photo that captures the horror of 9/11

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0:22Lila Nordstrom:I've been reading about other people's comments and they say that the falling man's soul was captured before he hit the ground.

0:30Richard Drew:Memories of 9-11, which changed everyone's life, especially those who saw it firsthand.

0:46Richard Drew:It is Friday, September 11th, and this is Here and Now Anytime from NPR and WBOR. I'm Chris Bentley. Today on the show, we are marking 25 years since 9-11. September 11, 2001 changed the world, but also our everyday lives. I did not appreciate that day how much September 11 would come to shape my adult life. We'll hear some of your memories. And after that, a woman who was in high school in lower Manhattan during 9-11 has grown up into an advocate for her classmates who got sick from breathing toxic air. The barge where they were bringing all of the debris from the World Trade Center site was morgue next to our school.

1:31Richard Drew:And so they were dumping debris next to our school all day. Before we get to that, though, a conversation with the photographer who captured an enduring image from that day. Almost 3 ,000 people died on September 11, 2001, when hijackers took over four planes. They crashed two into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, and one into the Pentagon. Passengers on the fourth plane struggled with the hijackers on board and forced them to crash in a field in Pennsylvania. People across the country rushed home from work, kids were pulled out of school, and millions watched in terror as the towers collapsed on live TV.

2:12Richard Drew:In a few minutes, we'll hear how 9-11 changed some of your lives in painful ways, but also with the perspective of 25 years in hopeful ways, too. But I'll let Robin Young get us started by talking about one image that came to represent it all.

2:29Lila Nordstrom:Do you have an image you just can't shake from 9-11? A woman at ground zero in shock, covered in gray dust with an elegant strand of pearls? Or the collapsed towers that look like a bombed World War II cathedral? Well, 25 years ago, AP photographer Richard Drew took another photo. He raced to the towers when told a plane had hit them. Emerging from the subway, he got to work. One of Richard Drew's photographs became known around the world as the Falling Man, a man appearing to plummet headfirst to his death from the North Tower. It's called one of the most famous photos that no one wants to see.

3:05Lila Nordstrom:It's that difficult. Esquire essayist Tom Juno called it our most intimate connection to the horror of that day. The 9-11 Museum displays it in a private alcove, along with this instrumental tribute from Dutch group Bastardi de Blues.

3:23Lila Nordstrom:I thought of him as a man that just took his life in his hands. Well, Richard, who joins us now to reflect on the power of his falling man photograph years on. Richard, what are your first thoughts looking back to where you were that day? Well, I guess I'm thinking about what would happen if someone hadn't pulled me away when the first building collapsed because I was directly across the street. And then I made my way back and was able to do some more photography. And you've also told us that in the run-up to this, you were on another shoot. There was a CNN cameraman there. You both almost simultaneously got news.

4:08Lila Nordstrom:Exactly. Something's happened with the tower. You take the subway. I had friends who were on the subway. It was very frightening to be down there and not know what you were coming up to. When you first came up and you saw the fires, what did you think? Well, I saw both towers were on fire, and I was wondering how one plane could hit both towers and the way the fire was on one side and on one and one on the other. And I didn't realize it until this police officer said, you know, I was here when the second plane hit. And I went, oh, my gosh. Yeah, right. and there you are looking at it, but how do you, we've seen the footage of the people staring up in shock.

4:47You did your work.

4:50Lila Nordstrom:What, what happened? What, I mean, I know you, you're a top photographer, you know, but it was it all instinct? What was it? Well, it's, it's, um, I've been with the AP now 56 years, but I've had experience in my career. Uh, in 1968, I was one of the photographers in the kitchen when Robert Kennedy was shot. I was actually walking right behind him. That moment, we know that moment. I just want to draw attention to the almost heavenly image that you have of RFK. There's a shaft of light on his face as he lies on the floor, hands reaching out to him. Well, that shaft of light was my savior in that.

5:32Lila Nordstrom:I didn't have a flash with me. I had gone out and put my flash in the car. I think it was a CBS video crew made their way back into the kitchen somehow. And that was the light from the CBS TV camera that came on. Again, you're in this moment and you capture this enduring image. That's when you were a young, young man just starting out. I was 21. Here you are on 9-11 raising your camera. I imagine, did you know, did you, at first it was hard to understand what we were seeing, just watching it on the television or looking up from the ground. What is that? What's that coming? What is that? Well, for me, the camera, actually my wife points out that the camera for me is a filter between reality and me.

6:26Lila Nordstrom:It's my job to photograph whatever happens in front of me. I record history every day and this is part of the history of this event and i'm photographing the the falling man wasn't just one photograph he was one of a series of of images of him falling from the building and uh it just so happened that the camera in this sequence um took the photo when he was in this perfectly vertical position if the camera had recycled at a fraction of a second either way. I still would have had pictures of the man falling, but it wouldn't have been as, I guess people say, as shocking an image because the way his verticality separates the two buildings, the North and South building.

7:14Lila Nordstrom:And he's exactly, he's falling like Tom Genot wrote, falling like an arrow. Falling like an arrow. Look, you know, we all have memories. I can remember a couple, they were both black, looked like they were workers, maybe colleagues. I don't know. She had a yellow dress on, beautiful yellow dress. He had a shirt and a tie. They were holding hands. Oh, I've heard about this couple, but I don't remember photographing. But isn't that something? I mean, we feel close to these people. Yes. Well, The Falling Man has become part of the legacy of September 11th and a part of my legacy. We now know that the falling man was probably Jonathan Briley, a sound engineer who worked at the Windows of the World restaurant at the top of the North Tower, which, of course, fell.

8:09Lila Nordstrom:A few days ago, his sister broke a 25-year silence. She had an interview with the Daily Mail. There are people who've been saying that what these jumpers did was suicide and therefore a sin. It's astonishing that there would be criticism of people who were escaping, unbelievable flames, you know, oil from the airplanes, horrendous. But Jonathan Pryley's sister said she disagrees with them. She believes that God is too benevolent. And then she said, I believe that all those individuals that jumped were caught. Their spirits were actually caught. You know, your thoughts on that. You caught him too.

8:52Lila Nordstrom:It's very hard to say actually whether they were falling or whether they jumped or whether they were forced out of the building or whether it was their choice. I've been reading about other people's comments and they say that the falling man's soul was captured. So actually that was what happened with the falling man. Yeah. It's powerful. You have to put a photo out there and release it, and other people will have their opinions on it. Yeah, there was another person who was tentatively identified along the way. It could have been Norberto Hernandez, who worked in the kitchen at Windows of the World.

9:34Lila Nordstrom:It was a—wow, excuse me, I'm thinking about it again. So, yeah, I didn't realize it until a few years ago that the names Norberta Hernandez and Jonathan Briley are separated by one name as they're inscribed on the border of the north reflecting pool. Oh, the memorial. The names are, yeah, there's one name in between them. When you just said, Richard, oh, you know, I'm thinking about this. What happened? What happens? i think about all the people that i photographed that day it just wasn't those two people who attended identified there was a a few years after i think it was in 2006 a man called the associated press office ap and said uh that he knew what his uh fiance was wearing that day when she went to work in the world trade center and he wanted to know if he could come and sit with me and look at my photos on my laptop.

10:35Lila Nordstrom:So he did. He came to the AP and we looked at the pictures and he saw what he believes was his fiance because he knew what she was wearing that day when she went to work. So I got to help him get closure about her fate on September 11th. Yeah. Well, that's a lot to carry for 25 years. That's a lot to carry. And I suppose for people who have said, we have no right to have these images. These are two intimate moments. You can say, but your recording of it helped at least one family. Right. And yet people to this day, 25 years later, are still offended or find it hard to look at Falling Man. And my photograph doesn't show any blood or guts.

11:29Lila Nordstrom:It's a very quiet photo, and it's a part of this man's life, a part of his last few moments of his life. But I think it's because people can identify with it. What would they do when they were in the same situation? Yeah. That's Associated Press photographer Richard Drew, who took the haunting Falling Man photo in Lower Manhattan on the morning of 9-11, 25 years ago. Richard, thank you so much for talking to us about it. Well, thank you for asking. It's been a pleasure talking to you.

12:04Richard Drew:We'll be right back.

12:15Richard Drew:Almost everyone who was around on 9-11 has memories of that day and what happened afterwards. We asked you how 9-11 changed your lives and got dozens of responses. Some talked about the fear and shock of the attacks, but also how you reached out to your communities for support in the aftermath. Some of you started volunteering or changed your career paths. Let's listen to some of what you shared with our producer, Ashley Locke. My best friend Myra Aronson was on the first plane, Flight 11, from Boston to Los Angeles on that Tuesday. And she was just a wonderful person. and we try to remember her.

12:59Richard Drew:It was a really sad, awful time. Because I'm a professional musician and I play the harp, I and several of my colleagues played many, many funerals for people on Myra's flight. I got to know so many people, so many families of those people who were on that flight. I did not appreciate that day how much September 11th would come to shape my adult life. Shortly after the attacks, I joined the military, and I did not understand how 9-11 would be the start of war without end for the United States. In many ways, the conflicts that came later in the Middle East were just new chapters of that same story.

13:49Richard Drew:so many years later when I found myself in the skies over Iraq or Syria I view that as just an extension of that day and my 19 year old self didn't appreciate at that moment how much the events of that Tuesday would shape what I did with the rest of my adult life. I can very much say that us in that age group, you know, I was 16 in 2001. It's been a constant repeating episode in our life, this constant just shocking things happening. And for me personally, it began with the September 11th attacks. So I was actually considering going into the military. And when I talked to my mother about it after all of this.

14:42Richard Drew:She was just, no, you know, she was absolutely against it. And I ended up not going into the military. So this probably changed my trajectory significantly. But I'm now a nurse. So the idea of still caring for people was innate. And I kept going in that way. How did 9-11 change my life? It did so in so many ways. I was a career foreign service officer at the Department of State. And I saw on TV on 9-11 at the State Department, I was standing near the front entrance when what was going on in New York was broadcast on the TV. I stepped outside in front of the State Department and saw the smoke coming from across the river where I knew the Pentagon was.

15:30Richard Drew:I immediately assumed it was Al-Qaeda because in 1998, I had left Nairobi just a few months before al-Qaeda attacked and destroyed many of my former colleagues and my office in Nairobi in what was a twin attack on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. I would later work with a group of 9-11 families who were responding to the loss of their loved ones by starting nonprofit organizations and foundations dedicated to building a safer, more compassionate world. We were a group of people who saw that the militaristic response couldn't be our only response as a country, and that the generosity of our country, our ability to make friends, not just punish enemies, needed to be a part of our response as well.

16:19Richard Drew:That was Marianne Scott of Washington, D.C., Julie Hernandez of Rockford, Illinois, Andrew Babacan of Virginia Beach, and Felice Pomeranz of Sudbury, Massachusetts. Thanks again to everyone who wrote in and shared their stories with us. It's great to hear from so many of you. You can always write in with thoughts, comments, and story tips, by the way. Our email address is letters at hereandnow.org. And we hope to hear from you again soon. By the way, we've got lots more coverage marking 25 years since 9-11 at hereandnow.org. And you can check out our podcast episode from September 9th. It's called 9-11 and the Long Shadow of Islamophobia.

17:00Richard Drew:You know, Muslim Americans have been dealing with a lot of things over the last 25 years, from vigilante violence to government repression to spies and informants in our midst, more violence against us and now a concerted effort by very conservative members of the government in an anti-sharia law caucus. This whole thing about the idea that sharia law is going to take over the United States, that's just also fear-mongering. And these are the kind of daily realities that Muslim Americans have been dealing with for the last 25 years.

17:37Richard Drew:you can hear that whole conversation anytime by scrolling back two episodes in your podcast feed we'll be back with more in a minute

17:54Richard Drew:less than a month after the twin towers fell students at manhattan's prestigious stuyvesant high school, returned to class. The school was just a few blocks from ground zero. To get there, the Stye kids had to clear checkpoints and cover their faces as they walked past smoldering fires and piles of debris. Inside the building, they breathed air so acrid their eyes burned. Among them, 17-year-old Lila Nordstrom. She'd go on to advocate for fellow students who contracted diseases after breathing that toxic air, and she wrote about her journey lobbying for victim compensation in Some Kids Left Behind, which came out in paperback this week.

18:35Richard Drew:Here's her conversation with Robin Young.

18:38Lila Nordstrom:In addition to the different maladies we'll talk about that you have, you were diagnosed with PTSD. So I have to ask, how are you feeling this week?

18:47Richard Drew:The anniversary season is always pretty difficult. You know, weeks like this where the coverage is going to be really traumatic, and I know sort of I'm going to have to tell the story over and over. But I do think that having been involved in advocacy work around this issue has been really important to my process in getting through.

19:05Lila Nordstrom:I'm wondering, too, so many things happening this week, including the release of previously withheld records regarding what people knew about 9-11, including one of the conclusions. The school and surrounding air were heavily contaminated with toxic World Trade Center dust. You already knew that, but to hear that, yeah.

19:26Richard Drew:I know. I mean, I guess I've been waiting a long time to get some validation that the city was aware of what they were doing, but also common sense told you that the air was not safe to breathe. But all of the assurances about how safe we'd be inside of our school building turned out to be false.

19:43Lila Nordstrom:Yeah, it's just hard to think of. And so to drive home what we're talking about, do you mind going back to that day?

19:51Richard Drew:Sure.

19:52Lila Nordstrom:Yeah.

19:52Richard Drew:So on 9-11, classes had begun. I was on the 10th floor of Stuyvesant, kind of overlooking the World Trade Center. And so, you know, my class watched everything transpire. I managed to set foot outside the moment the second tower collapsed. So I actually ended up in like a stampede of office workers. And I started to run. But I'm a lifelong asthmatic. I didn't get very far. And eventually I stopped and flagged down a teacher that I recognized. And we kind of gathered students and walked as a group uptown. And I eventually walked 10 miles that day and I didn't feel safe going home because we thought planes were everywhere and they were all going to hit buildings.

20:30Lila Nordstrom:Okay. And October 9th, you return.