EXCERPT: 20 years on, ‘The Falling Man’ is still you and me

By RICHARD DREW
Associated Press

Twenty years on, Associated Press photographer Richard Drew still gets asked about the “Falling Man” photograph he took on 9/11. He has been invited on national talk shows, interviewed by foreign TV crews and asked to speak about it at universities across the country. Esquire magazine published a 7,000-word essay that hailed it as a masterpiece and a touching work of art. All this for a single frame out of hundreds shot in haste before he was pulled to safety as the second tower of the World Trade Center tumbled toward him. His fellow photographers called it “the most famous picture nobody’s ever seen.”