Staking out his real estate, he walked west, to where ambulances were gathering, because rescue workers 'usually won't throw you out'. He got out at the Chambers Street station and saw that both towers had been turned into smokestacks. Although it was still running, he was the only one on it. He packed his equipment into a bag and gambled on taking the subway downtown. He was doing what he always does at fashion shows - 'staking out real estate' - when a CNN cameraman with an earpiece said that a plane had crashed into the North Tower, and Drew's editor rang his cellphone. In a lifetime of taking pictures, he has found a way to be both mild-mannered and brusque, patient and very, very quick. He was sparse in the scalp, grey in the beard, hard in the head. On assignment for AP, he was shooting a maternity fashion show in Bryant Park, notable, he says, 'because it featured actual pregnant models'. Indeed, he was shooting bodies on the morning of 11 September 2001. It is not even up to him to distinguish if a body is alive or dead, because the camera makes no such distinctions, and he is in the business of shooting bodies, as all photographers are, unless they are Ansel Adams. It is not up to him to reject the images that fill his frame, because one never knows when history is made until one makes it. Although he has preserved the jacket patterned with Kennedy's blood, he has never not taken a picture, never averted his eye. His jacket was spattered with Kennedy's blood, but he jumped on a table and shot pictures of Kennedy's open and ebbing eyes, and then of Ethel Kennedy crouching over her husband and begging photographers - begging him - not to take pictures. When he was 21 years old, he was standing right behind Bobby Kennedy when Bobby Kennedy was shot in the head. The photographer has that presence of mind and has had it since he was a young man. In the actual moment history is made, it is usually made in terror and confusion, and so it is up to people like him - paid witnesses - to have the presence of mind to attend to its manufacture. The photographer is no stranger to history he knows it is something that happens later. In the picture, he is frozen in his life outside the frame, he drops and keeps dropping until he disappears. He will soon be travelling at upwards of 150 miles per hour, and he is upside down. He is, 15 seconds past 9.41am EST, the moment the picture is taken, in the clutches of pure physics, accelerating at a rate of 32 feet per second squared. 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. Some people who look at the picture see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation others see something else - something discordant and therefore terrible: freedom. 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. He bisects them: everything to the left of him in the picture is the North Tower everything to the right, the South. The man in the picture, by contrast, is perfectly vertical, and so is in accord with the lines of the buildings behind him. Some of them are shirtless their shoes fly off as they flail and fall they look confused, as though trying to swim down the side of a mountain. They are made puny by the backdrop of the towers, which loom like colossi, and then by the event itself. In all the other pictures, the people who did what he did - who jumped - appear to be struggling against horrific discrepancies of scale. His black high-tops are still on his feet. His white shirt, or jacket, or frock, is billowing free of his black pants. His left leg is bent at the knee, almost casually. His arms are by his side, only slightly outriggered. He does not appear intimidated by gravity's divine suction or by what awaits him. He appears comfortable in the grip of unimaginable motion. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. If he were not falling, he might very well be flying. Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it. In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow.
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