Falling Woman

“After a suicide, cause and blame become inextricable, and questions about personal agency become urgent and obscure.” — Adam Phillips, Promises, Promises.

“A suicide’s excuses are mostly casual. At best they assuage the guilt of the survivors, soothe the tidy-minded and encourage the sociologists in their endless search for convincing categories and theories. … The real motives which impel a man to take his own life are elsewhere; they belong to the internal world, devious, contradictory, labyrinthine, and mostly out of sight.” — A Alvarez, The Savage God. 

On January 5th 2006 a harrowing photograph printed on the inside page of The Times newspaper caught my attention. A figure is frozen in mid-air - is this figure falling, floating or ascending? - outside of the fourth floor window of a South Kensington hotel. Below, a smaller accompanying photograph backfills the causal chain: a distressed, middle-aged woman falters on a sixth floor cornice. To her side a gravely calm woman leans over the balustrade extending an open hand to the woman’s, which press flat against the exterior wall. This woman is neither floating nor ascending, but falling. Perhaps to write she is falling is incorrect; she has leapt of her own volition. “Mystery of leading lawyer's suicide leap from hotel” reads the headline. An absent third photograph would have shown the woman after the leap, concluding the tragic story. As sure as crockery smashes and airplanes fall out of the sky, gravity is sobering. 

When I look at the woman perched up on high I see an individual who, shortly after the photograph was taken, ended her life. In contrast with the short time frame available to photograph the leap itself, the photographer would have had many tries at catching the woman’s desperation throes up there. In the large photograph that portrays the leap the woman is an inhuman form. It is an unimaginable motion. How long does the motion feel? What does one think about? What does one look like? 

The camera’s mechanical aptitude arrests the figure in mid-air. This is the precision-proficiency fantasy behind Henri Cartier-Bresson’s puddle jumper, but instead of surreal beauty here there is a dreadful dizzying sense of motion expressed by the blurred buildings in the background. (“The decisive moment,” wrote photography critic John Szarkowski in the Photographer’s Eye exhibition catalogue of 1964, “... has been misunderstood; the thing that happens at the decisive moment is not a dramatic climax but a visual one. The result is not a story but a picture.”) This camera has been panned, meaning the camera was tipped to follow the woman’s direction of travel as the shutter released. The most basic photography manuals teach panning to capture fast moving objects, such as cars and trains. Here, panning the camera renders a clearer defined object in the foreground at the expense of background definition. 

An agency photographer was among those who stopped during their daily business to watch, more attentively than others, as the spectacle unfolded. Perhaps he was tipped off by a viewing member of the public and caught the tube or bus to the scene? His photographs evidence patience and technical prowess, although ultimately their success is that the woman leapt.

The newspaper article endows the visual spectacle: Falling woman is 52-year-old “X”, a successful corporate lawyer for Rolls Royce. On Monday evening “X” had booked into the hotel alone in South Kensington, less than a mile from her own flat in Onslow Gardens. The following day at noon members of the public spotted her above the street. By all accounts in the weeks preceding the tragic event “X” had not displayed any unusual behaviour. A housekeeper of a flat in the block “X” lived in was shocked by the news. "She was such a lovely lady,” she told a Times reporter. “She always said ‘hello’ when I saw her and seemed quite happy…. The last time I saw her was a couple of weeks ago. She seemed her usual self, not in the least bit unhappy." 

Asked about the leap the photographer John Bushell told reporters "She rocked back and forth… Suddenly she bent her legs and held her arms out as if she was diving into a swimming pool and jumped." In The New Yorker in 2003 an article by Tad Friend, called Jumpers, observed a similar posture assumed by those who jump from the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Surprisingly, the posture for leaping to concrete is not dissimilar to leaping into water. In Friend's article Dr Lanny Berman, executive director of the American Association of Suicidology, explains how people who jump from Golden Gate tend to idealize what will happen: "Suicidal people have transformation fantasies and are prone to magical thinking, like children and psychotics…They think that life will slow down in those final seconds, and then they'll hit the water cleanly, like a high diver." From the moment a person leaps to when they hit the water’s surface lasts approximately four seconds.  The few who have survived report that during motion time seems to slow down. Survivor Anne McGuire, who leapt from Golden Gate in 1979, recalls how she told herself "I must be about to hit" three times. According to Friend "jumpers hit the water… at about seventy-five miles an hour and with a force of fifteen thousand pounds per square inch…the coroner's usual verdict, suicide caused by 'multiple blunt-force injuries.'"

It is not clear if a third photograph depicting the mystery lawyer’s lifeless body exists; when the story was current no newspaper published it. Even if this third photograph did exist, running it almost certainly would have been in breach of the Code of Practice outlined by the industry’s regulatory body the Press Complaints Commission - a self-regulating guideline to which the industry makes a binding commitment, not a piece of legal legislation. 

Section five of the Code entitled “Intrusion into grief or shock” decrees:

i) In cases involving personal grief or shock, enquiries and approaches must be made with sympathy and discretion and publication handled sensitively…

*ii) When reporting suicide, care should be taken to avoid excessive detail about the method used.

According to the Code, part ii of this clause is up for debate. If, given the circumstances, excessive detail of method in the report of a suicide can be demonstrated to be in public interest then the editor is justified. When an editor is deemed unjustified the reasons teach what would have been acceptable to show and as such express a threshold of societal values. And, because newspapers consist of words and photographs, if a photograph portraying an event is deemed tasteless and a written article is not, we have a fascinating measure of how these constituent parts interact with the world.

It was on the grounds of intrusion into shock or grief that the PCC received five complaints about The Times’ coverage of the lawyer’s death. The Commission summarized these complaints on their website, stating that the newspaper had demonstrated an extreme lack of sensitivity and intruded into the grief of those who knew “X” by publishing the photographs. When questioned by the Commission The Times’ editor expressed regret. However, in his defense, he argued that because the death had occurred in a very public place, in the middle of the day in central London, and was witnessed by members of the public, it was justified. It was an unusual story and therefore deemed newsworthy. The decision to publish the article and photographs had been taken only after the lawyer had been identified, by which time her relatives had been informed and her professional and personal details emerged. The editor felt that the newspaper had neither glamorized nor trivialized her death and did not publish pictures of her body. How newsworthy would the article have been without those other photographs?  

Whether or not it was the result of pressure from the PCC, the following day the newspaper used a “dignified” portrait of “X” on the front page. Inside, a follow-up story offered empathetic treatment of suicide, detailing specialist services should readers be affected. Further, it published two letters critical of the newspaper’s representation of the lawyer’s suicide. Even in spite of the politics of friends and family lobbying the PCC, “Mystery of leading lawyer's suicide leap from hotel” received considerable interest among a British readership. What does this fascination with the death of a lawyer mean? What is “unusual” and therefore newsworthy about it? Perhaps it was that she was a highly regarded and successful professional woman.

I’ve not seen this photograph for six years. After the article was published in 2006 the large photograph remained tacked to my wall for eight months. I couldn’t not view it every day and for me became an emblematic ethical image. A few summers later the film Man on Wire was released in cinemas globally. It told the story of a man who walked a tight rope between the Twin Towers in New York in 1974. As falling was implicit in high wire walking, so too was the future catastrophe 9/11. The third effect of these conspiring factors - the possibility of the artist’s failure and Towers in flames - was images of those World Trade Centre office workers impelled to exit the inferno by jumping.

I was reminded of the photograph of the suicide lawyer that had been on my wall several years before, now lost. Besides how viewing this photograph had made me feel, and that the victim was a lawyer, I could no longer recall specific details. Internet searches eventually led to the buried article on The Times website archive. It was accompanied by that “dignified” portrait of the lawyer: It is summer; across her shoulders, over a silk dress with embroidered flowers, she wears a calico shawl; A silver band adorns her right wrist; around her neck is a ruby stone. She is glamorous and beaming, except where the photograph has been re-sized disproportionately she is grossly elongated from left to right. Scrolling down the page I anticipated John Bushell’s photograph of “X” between cornice and pavement but it wasn’t there. With more specific information I refined my search. Still no photograph. Had the times pandered to institutional pressure and removed the picture from circulation? I broadened my search, threw in some wildcards, yet it had, it seemed, been removed. Information disappeared. To be sure, this was censorship – that difficult word in liberal society. Quite rightly, this photograph was suppressed in order to protect the dignity of “X” and the memory of “X” for friends and family for whom life continues. But how does it differ to the coroner who writes on the suicide’s death certificate: “Died by misadventure”?

A wide shot shows two figures skimming the tower’s latticed fascia in succession. Above, only meters below the strangely horizontal inferno, a third perches in the cell-like window waving a jacket. They are so high above the ground it seems they are invisible; nobody down there is coming to their aid. The jacket flails with increasing vigor. It stops and is dropped. The person hits the ground long before the garment. Where the video clip is not overdubbed by emotive memorial tracks - or given the religio-angelic treatment, one can hear distorted exclamatory cries. What were the conditions in those towers that caused those to leap of their own volition? A different video, this time close-up, shows us in detail what a person looks like falling from the World Trade Center. A shocking retardation of the human form takes place in air. At velocity the body describes a headlong forward spin, clothing and limbs flail diversely. The close-up abstracts relative scale. Against a geometric fascia bodies fall for an implausibly long time and it is as though they will never meet the ground.

The inhuman deformation of these falling bodies is profoundly affecting. Essentially the act represents a crisis of choice, between willful and unwilful ending of one’s own life. In these circumstances, to gain control over certain unwilful death, a choice can be made: remain inside the tower and die by impersonal forces or make a leap of faith and evacuate the tower.

Of all the images – videos, video stills, mobile phone pictures – of World Trade Center evacuees one of an office worker falling head first from the north tower who came to be known as “Falling Man” has become iconic.

“Do you remember this photograph?” writes Tom Junod in the September 2003 issue of Esquire magazine, “In the United States, people have taken pains to banish it from the record of September 11, 2001. The story behind it, though… is our most intimate connection to the horror of that day.” Despite attempts to censor the falling man image it remains in circulation. Just as well if, to follow Junod, it is a key to understanding events of that day. 

New York writer Don DeLillo seems in agreement with Junod about the significance of this photograph. DeLillo’s novel Falling Man - in homage to this anonymous office worker - explores the physical and psychological landscape of New York in the weeks following 9/11. Falling Man is the eponymous name of a protagonist in this novel, a performance artist dressed for the office, wearing concealed wire and harness, witnessed with increasing frequency leaping from high places around New York city. Each time he falls he assumes the same posture - that artlessly assumed by the office worker in that photograph. Junod’s regard for this photograph enfolds heaven, hell, Hollywood and Modernist American nationalism. This is a man who, “Although… has not chosen his fate, appears to have… embraced it.” Junod continues:

“He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. He does not appear intimidated by gravity's divine suction… His left leg is bent at the knee, almost casually. His white shirt, or jacket, or frock, is billowing free of his black pants. His black high-tops are still on his feet. In all the other pictures, the people who did what he did… appear to be struggling. The man in the picture, by contrast, is perfectly vertical, and so is in accord with the lines of the buildings behind him. He splits them, bisects them… 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... Some people who look at the picture see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation; others see something else -- something discordant and therefore terrible: freedom. 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.”

This photograph has not been removed from circulation because it is too important ideologically. It is a photograph for the hearts and minds of the global community. Amid so many harrowing pictures of office workers, buildings and planes falling, it is an image of calm redemption for when the dust has settled. Suicide in this photograph is expunged of taboo. Is this a dignified subject? Is it an intrusion into grief or shock?

The performance artist in DeLillo’s novel Falling Man is notoriously reticent about his intentions. New Yorkers respond to his actions with outrage, indignation and even violence. “There were people shouting up at him,” DeLillo writes, “outraged at the spectacle, the puppetry of human desperation, a body’s last fleet breath and what it held… A man was dangling there, above the street, upside down. He wore a business suit, one leg bent up, arms at his sides. A safety harness was barely visible, emerging from his trousers at the straightened leg and fastened to the decorative rail of the viaduct.” Nearing the novel’s end the protagonist Lianne discovers the artist’s obituary in the newspaper. At first she is unable to read about this man, the “‘Heartless Exhibitionist or Brave New Chronicler of the Age of Terror.’” She herself had witnessed the haunting apparition of Falling Man at the elevated platform of 125th street where he stood looming, legs slightly spread, in deep concentration, readying himself to leap in time to avoid the oncoming train. 

Lianne is a book editor: she is educated, cosmopolitan and rational. Yet since the estranged father of her child turned up at her doorstep covered in dust and glass - a miraculous survivor of the towers - later to be allowed into her bed once more, her behaviour becomes increasingly paranoid. She is given to Islamophobic impulses, picking a fight with a neighbour for playing Middle-Eastern music audible from the hallway. She is horrified that her child watches the horizon through a pair of binoculars in anticipation of “Bill Lawton, Bill Lawton”. Bearing witness to Falling Man at 125th street triggers some small trauma for Lianne. “David Janiak,” the artist’s obituary reads, “studied acting and dramaturgy at the Institute for Advanced Theatre Training in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His training included a three-month residency at the Moscow Art Theatre School.” He is a skilled dancer; versed in movement. Why then, after all his training, does he imitate and make a fetish of this one gesture? It is as if his years of training are sublimated into this one ultimate gesture laden with poignancy and meaning. By repeatedly attempting in public to master the gesture, which is so artlessly assumed by the falling man in the photograph, DeLillo’s performance artist becomes a kind of Brechtian device that holds up a broken mirror to catastrophe.