Men on Wire

Performing 9/11

Abstract

The horrid sight of people jumping from the burning towers on 9/11 has been identified as one of the major causes of post-traumatic stress disorder related to the terrorist attacks. One photograph, showing a man falling head first as though performing a dive, appeared in hundreds of newspapers the day after the tragedy but soon became a taboo, never to be published again. Nevertheless, reverberations of its traumatizing effect can be felt in a number of works of art. By applying Roland Barthes’s terminology as an analytic tool, my purpose is to reveal inherent ambiguities in the photograph’s iconography that render its “verticality and symmetry” a palimpsest of interlacing significations. I will then proceed to examine artistic responses to this silenced aspect of the trauma of 9/11 in Kerry Skarbakka’s photographic performances, Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man, and James Marsh’s documentary Man on Wire.