The Nearness of Others: Searching for Tact and Contact in the Age of HIV

The Falling Man

Others 97 TheFallingMan There exist many famous photos of historical trauma and human suffering. We all know the one with the small Jewish boy from the Warsaw ghetto, walking with his hands up, as a German soldier points a rifle at him. We have seen Phan Thi Kim Phúc, the Vietnamese girl running naked down a dirt road, her body burned by napalm. And the Vietcong fighter grimacing a second before a South Vietnamese officer shoots him in the head in Eddie Adams’s Pulitzer Prize–­ winning photo. Much nearer today is the picture of a hooded Iraqi man in Abu Ghraib prison, standing on a box, electrodes dangling from his extended arms. Heartrending and revolting as these images may be, they are not, strictly speaking, impossible to look at. Not that their ubiquity has dulled their power to shock, necessarily, but the fact that they have played such a culturally significant role has displaced their primary meaning away from what they depict to who looks at them. Soon after the abuses at Abu Ghraib were revealed to the public, T-­ shirts and stickers bearing the silhouette of the hooded man on the box, with the first-­ person caption “Not in my name,” started to appear. These images were primarily concerned with the United States and its suffering national self, not with the man whose humiliation became industrially reproduced and worn as a statement about someone else. I do not subscribe to the idea that the Abu Ghraib photos should not have been shown because doing so would only perpetuate the humiliation and torture of these men. These were sickening photos, and seeing them was necessary to turn as many people as possible against torture and against the war itself. But if the image of the hooded man could function as such a powerful symbol, it is precisely because it could not not be looked at, because we could not take our eyes off of it. And that’s the problem. By becoming so symbolic, the individual man figured on the picture became,in a sense,severed from himself and made to stand for something bigger but also more abstract, like man’s inhumanity to man rather than a person’s suffering in a specific historical and political situation. One picture that never let itself be enrolled in the service of sentimental humanism is the one of the man falling from the World Trade Center on 9/11. Many such pictures were taken that day, but few were shown, at least in the United States.The one I’m thinking of,however,became the object of a short-­ lived controversy after it was published in the New York Times the next day. Many readers were scandalized because, they said, the photo was 98 Others so large that the man on it could possibly be recognized. It showed a man in a shirt and tie falling head first, presumably after jumping to his death, as so many did, to escape a more horrific death in the flames. Maybe the man could be recognized, but in the same way that the people on the flyers could be recognized. Unlike the firefighters’ chaplain, whose lifeless body being carried out, as in a classic Deposition, by the very men he ministered to was pictured everywhere, the falling man could not be turned into a hero or a saint. We could not separate ourselves from him. And the picture remains impossible to behold. But to figure out why isn’t easy, for if it were possible to articulate precisely why this picture was never used as a cultural symbol, then we could easily look at it. In fact, we would have to look at it to analyze it. So I’ll venture a hypothesis that I will not attempt to prove. From a purely theoretical standpoint, there is no such thing as a picture that cannot be looked at, since it is the act of looking that makes it a picture. And nothing in the picture itself may ever guarantee that it won’t be made into a symbol, because the process of symbolization necessarily involves many more participants, human and not, and the complex web of their interactions. For example, in a conversation, once, a friend of mine referred to this picture as “the man falling from the towers.” I didn’t pick up on the oddity of the phrase until much later. The man, of course, was falling from one tower, not...