It’s the flawless composition of the image that also gets me. The purity, stillness, and utter lack of movement with the frozen frame. No blur in the man, no fuzziness in the windows. The clarity makes it almost antiseptic as the image disguises nothing. At the same time it forces us to become The Falling Man, psychologically , if only for a disturbed moment. We trade places with him when we see this, until it becomes unbearable and we look away—and then look back to see if it’s really real, still there, still actually happened. I felt the same way about the Challenger explosion, those curling white plumes against a crystal blue sky. And just like that tragedy, within this picture I find no moral quandary. Just shock and guilty fascination.

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