In a New York Times story last weekend, by Alex Williams, Mrs. Laura Horn discussed how she spent a couple of days using Photoshop and, like some Kremlin retoucher from the 50s, successfully extracted her ex-husband from all of the pictures in their family photo album.

“In my own reality, I know that these things did happen,” Ms. Horn said. But “without him in them, I can display them. I can look at those pictures and think of the laughter we were sharing, the places we went to. This new reality is a lot more pleasant.”

...Well, she'll always have Paris.

An email from Susan Malus, of Brooklyn, New York….

Dear Mr. Friend,

I just stumbled onto your story about a Ms. Lucas contacting you [described in a November 15, 2006 blog post on this Website], searching for a photograph in The New York Times of a man falling from one of the WTC towers. I too have been searching for that photograph. I recall the shock and controversy about the Times' decision to use it and even a story about the process they went through in deciding. The man's features couldn't be made out, which was one reason in favor of using it.

I'm working on a novel about 9/11 and wanted to confirm something I made notes about several years ago regarding the photo. What I recall especially is a bright blue sky behind him and the awful beauty of the shot as contrasted with what its revelation, especially to those of us elsewhere. (I was in Bklyn., where I still live -- elsewhere enough when all transit shuts down.) I too saw the reference to a photo in Esquire and was very excited, only to be completely confused when I looked at it. The sky had made a powerful impression on me and there was no sky in that picture. And the man I recalled was not upside down.

I looked for Ms. Lucas' email address online but didn't find her listed in Port Chester. If you still have her email address or a phone number, could you pass this along to her? Or if you have found the answer, pass it along to me? Or both -- I'd like her to know how relieved I was to see her letter. Having searched just about everywhere, having not seen even a reference to the photo I remembered, I was starting to worry about the state of my mind. (It's hard enough to write a novel; finding an somewhat important reference disappear is just too bizarre.)

The Times publishes a front page for the first five days after 9/11. I looked at all of those and at the magazine section covers for September too, in case I'd gotten confused about which section carried it. I also did my best to search the 'News in Review' though that seemed to get stuck often. I've probably spent 15 hours searching just the paper itself for the photo and the article but still -- nothing. It's a mystery that I hope you will solve.

Thank you for your patience in reading this and, in advance, for any help you can provide.

Sincerely,
Susan Malus

In 2006, I had a similar, if less vivid, recollection of such an image. Now, two years later, it is less distinct in my mind and I’m wondering if I saw such a scene on video, not in print. What's more, in Watching the World Change I have written at length about the other photograph she mentions, taken by Richard Drew, which was the subject of an award-winning essay in Esquire in by Tom Junod.

My response, via email, to Susan….

Dear Susan Malus,

As far as I can tell, my contacts were never able to find this photograph that you are referring to. Perhaps it was in an early edition. Perhaps it was in the Daily News or Post or Newsday. In any event, let me forward this to the man who was the deputy picture editor of The New York Times that day. He is a friend of mine. Let me see what he says. Sorry for my delay in responding.

All the best, David

Susan’s response…

Thank you for your help - I really appreciate it.

I'm certain it was the Times because of the background piece published later on why they chose it. My husband also recalls the photo with the sky behind it -- about half of the background was the building, about half the sky.

Also, I didn't buy or subscribe to other papers or news magazines. And three of us recall it being the Times; I'm really certain it was.

In the meantime, my grateful thanks for taking the time to follow up on this.

Sincerely,
Susan Malus

My response…

Sorry to report that my friend (who was a picture editor at the Times in 2001) wrote me the following, when I forwarded him your email:

“I don't recall us running any image of a falling person except the Richard Drew picture. That's a fairly vivid memory only because I remember the discussion about whether or not to use such a picture at all.”

I’m afraid this doesn’t shed any light at all.

Would you mind if I posted your email on my book blog in the coming week or so and perhaps other readers would respond?

Thanks, David

Susan’s response…

Please do reprint my letter. And thanks again. Maybe someone will shed light on this.

By the way, the Drew photo, which was also on the Esquire website, was a much closer shot of the person; if you knew him, you might almost recognize him. And I believe it's on the Esquire site that the story is told about a family who lost someone in the NY attacks. Some of them did think they recognized him while others were furious at the very idea and the two camps stopped speaking.

I've asked other friends about this and they all remember, without any prompting, that there was both building and sky and that the falling figure was tiny.

Sincerely,
Susan

So... Does anyone out there have any insight on this subject?

HERE IS THE ORIGINAL BLOG POST, FROM NOVEMBER 15, 2006…

A FALLING MAN, STILL MISSING

After reading my book, Michele C. Lucas of Port Chester, New York, sent a compelling letter about her fascination with a single photo taken on September 11, one that she remembers spotting in a newspaper or magazine shortly after the attacks.


In her "Image of the Falling Man," as she has come to think of it, a figure is shown in freefall, descending from one of the World Trade towers. His tie, she recalls, is fluttering in the air. The picture, as you can read in her letter, has become something of an obsession to her. And after I telephoned her to discuss her letter, she agreed to let me post it on line, in the hope that a reader of the book or a visitor to this blog might know of a place on the Internet or in print that might have published this picture.


I, too, remember having seen just such a picture. In my mind’s eye, it is a still photograph, though I may actually be remembering a videotape. Nikki Stern, whose husband perished on September 11, told me that she remembered a similar photograph, possibly printed in Time magazine, though when I called her, to follow up on Michele Lucas’s query, she admitted she may have been recalling Richard Drew’s famous “Falling Man” image, showing a man—without a tie—plummeting head-first that day. (An account in USA Today, published on September 2, 2002, describes an eyewitness who sees a man falling from one of the towers with “his tie flapping in the wind.”)


And yet, having surfed the Web and having sifted through my shelf of photographs and of 9/11-related books, I couldn’t find the photograph that so haunts the writer of the letter, reprinted here.


Is there anyone out there would can shed light – or point her in the right direction? If so, please e-mail me at dfriend@vf.com.



Letter from Michele Lucas….


As soon as I heard about your book, Watching The World Change, I put 
everything aside to read it…. I was hoping you, who have seen so many images of 9/11, might be able to help me find the one among millions that I seek.


On September 12, 2001, I opened The New York Times to a picture of a man falling from one of the towers. I had not expected such a picture as I turned the page, and so was stunned and horrified. I stared at the picture, feeling as the photographer Richard Drew was quoted as saying in your book, “He is you and me.” When I closed the paper that day I said that I never wanted to see such a picture again.


But I kept the newspaper and put it away with the issues of Time and Newsweek and The New York Times magazine and a few other accounts of the day. Why I kept these things I do not know. For my grandchildren, even though I absurdly never want them to know about this event or any other like it?


Although I never looked at the picture in the Times again, I was never able to get the image of the Falling Man out of my mind. It was vivid, it was full of detail, it was poignant and horrifying all at once. He was indeed me. And when I prayed for him I was praying for all the victims of 9/11. He personified for me the suffering of that day.


[Some time] later, I was listening to the NPR evening news, to an interview with a writer [Tom Junod] about an article he had written for the current issue of Esquire about The Falling Man whose picture appeared in The New York Times on September 12, 2001. I had vowed never to look at the picture again, yet I rushed immediately to buy the issue of Esquire. I wanted to know about the man I had held fast for so long. I steeled myself to turn the pages of the magazine, to see again the man falling, falling, falling.


But as bad as I expected the moment to be, when I saw the picture again it was so much worse. This was not My Falling Man. I ran to the closet to retrieve the bo where I had kept my accounts of 9/11. I found the Times of September 12th, and I was as certain as I had ever been about anything, that the writer of the article in Esquire was wrong, that when I turned the page there he would be - My Falling Man. But it was not My Falling Man. It was Esquire’s Falling Man. I felt that I had gone crazy. Frantically I went through the rest of the material I had saved searching for the man who belonged to me. He was nowhere.


Over the next days I searched the Internet, but I did not find him. Everything I saw was at such a distance and nothing matched what I remembered. For months I continued to search, but I never found him. I asked friends, but no one remembered seeing such a man. I felt as though I had lost a relative or a good friend. I still felt a little crazy.


The man was a businessman, you could tell that by what he wore - dark suit pants, a white dress shirt. His hair was dark, his skin was white. He appeared to be young rather than old, though I’m not sure why. He was falling legs down, head up, his body leaned somewhat to his right and his head was turned to the left just enough so you could not make out his features. The most poignant aspect, at least to me, was his tie, which was swooshed up over his left shoulder. I even remember the tie to be striped, though, even if I ever saw such a photo, I don’t know how I could see that much detail.


The thing was, I could see him that morning, putting on that tie, getting ready to go to work the same as he did most every weekday morning. The tie made him seem so real, so human, so heroic almost. Here was this beautiful fall day, and still he was putting on a tie and going to work, going to do his job, going to contribute to the economic scheme of things, when he might rather be going fishing or to the beach or sailing on such a gorgeous day.


As time went by and I could not locate My Falling Man, I convinced myself that I had seen him in a dream. After all, we were so bombarded with images on 9/11 and in the days that followed, I could have had a very vivid dream about a falling man and thought that it was real. I had just about convinced myself when I related my story to yet another friend, who told me that she remembered the man, she remembered him because of the tie, and I was back to square one. She feels that she saw him on television, but I don’t know. All the TV shots I saw of people falling were at too great a distance. I feel that the picture I remember must have been taken with the zoom lens of a still camera.


Why do I care so much? I’m not sure. I’m way past doubting my sanity which was definitely an issue at the beginning. I think I care because I have had this man in my life for so long, and he stands for all those who suffered such an atrocious death simply because they had gone to work that day. If I relegate him to a dream when he really existed, then he has been forgotten and I do him such a disservice. In some strange, possibly morbid way, I miss him.


On page 73 of your book Nikki Stern speaks of a picture of a man falling with his tie floating up. The columnist who ran this picture is mentioned but not named. Perhaps you could tell me who it was. Or perhaps you could just recommend another avenue I could pursue. I don’t intend to spend my life searching, but your book has given me some hope that perhaps My Falling Man is there somewhere among all the images of 9/11. Of course, I didn’t realize until I read your book that there were so many images in existence where my man could be hiding, so I know it is a long shot that you would remember one among so many. But again, there is that tie, something about the tie, that commands your attention, that makes the poor man memorable, so maybe, maybe.



...You have written a fine book, fascinating and moving. I am not, at this stage of my life, much of a weeper, but I actually burst out into tears on page 200 where you quoted John Labriola as saying, “the one conclusion I came to on 9/11 is that people in the stairwell--and this is my Catholic upbringing talking--really were in a state of grace.” I responded with my Catholic upbringing to the concept of grace at work on that day. Grace was hard to see, but I must believe that it was there. Your book gives us a whole different perspective on the event without in any way losing the emotional and spiritual aspects of what happened.


I thank you so much for bearing with me this far (if indeed you have)...


Best regards,
Michele C. Lucas


(The writer goes on to say that she remembers encountering me from time to time when we both worked at Life magazine in the early 1980, myself as a reporter, she in the copy department, I believe. But I'm sorry to say that I don't recall her.)

In response to a rash of injuries and scuffles that have resulted when paparazzi packs gather to stalk stars, the Los Angeles City Council has created a task force which convened a hearing this week to study whether new ordnances should be established to limit the photographers’ movements – or, possibly, to require paparazzi to register for licenses.

The chief of the LAPD, William J. Bratton, reacting to the hubbub, called the hearing “a total waste of time,” according to The New York Times. “If you notice, since Britney started wearing clothes and behaving; Paris is out of town not bothering anybody, thank God; and, evidently, Lindsay Lohan has gone gay, we don’t seem to have much of an issue.”

Michael Kamber and Tim Arango filed a front-page story in The New York Times this weekend that should give every journalist a jolt. They described the swift and blanket retribution that the U.S. military brought to bear on a half dozen photographers who dared publish images of American war dead during this five-year fiasco.

While reading their in-depth investigation, I was reminded of the restrictions placed on combat photographers and their assigning publications during World War II up through the Gulf War and realized yet again how little the media consumer sees of palpable reality. If we are to believe the coverage of the current conflict, we are witnessing the damnedest war ever fought: a war without coffins; a war without battlefield casualties; a war fought on the cheap (in which our soldiers have lacked proper equipment and loved ones have had to raise funds to send flak-jackets) that has nonetheless escalated to $1 trillion; a war that has generated 4,000 military funerals – which the war’s commander-in-chief routinely declines to attend. We even have a stage-managed war zone purported to be “safe” by its new cheerleader, John McCain, even as he walks through an Iraqi bazaar surrounded by a cordon of armed attendants, a swarm of helicopters flying overhead. (For an extended essay on Iraq as “A War Waged in Images,” see pages 293-307 of Watching the World Change, a section that expands on an article I wrote for American Photo in 2003 and published online on The Digital Journalist Website.)

In our newspapers, on our websites, throughout our television broadcasts, death’s face is in the shadows, in the numbers, in between the lines. But in victims' nightmares and in soldiers’ gunsites and fever dreams – and in the memories’ viewfinders of every photojournalist who has covered this conflict – death stares back with a gaze as cold and steady as the moon’s.

...And while we're on the subject...please telescope back to March 2008 to read photographer Max Becherer’s chilling account of his five years in Iraq, published in the Times on the fifth anniversary of the start of the war.

...AND SPEAKING OF McCAIN and OBAMA check out these two satricial postings on VanityFair.com.

This e-mail from John C. Browne, of St. George, Utah…

“As you point out, everyone has a 9-11 story.

“I was on Capitol Hill that day, having a meeting with the Senate Armed Services committee staff - in the Senate Hart Building (I was Director of Los Alamos National Lab at the time) and after seeing the TV footage of the World Trade Center immediately called my staff at Los Alamos to tell them to increase security levels.

“I then walked across the Capitol grounds just as the word came that another plane had hit the Pentagon. (We could actually see the smoke!) The Capitol police told us another plane was headed toward the Capitol building and directed us toward the subways. Since we were involved in a lot of counter-terrorism technology, I knew that the subway could be a target as well - especially for a bio-attack - so I walked about 10 blocks to the Department of Energy and got involved in some of the CT response.

“….It was one of the most challenging periods of my life - our people at Los Alamos were involved in the over-flights of NYC to determine the hazardous nature of the smoke content and then the analysis of the anthrax samples and the interrogation of DC mail.

“My biggest terrorism concern still surrounds a nuclear device stolen and smuggled into one of the world's capitals - people are working hard on this but it is a very challenging problem.

“…As you said, no one ever forgets that day. I am glad you wrote your book and shared the images of 9-11.”

Despite the best-laid plans, the Memorial at Ground Zero will be nowhere near completion by the tenth anniversary of the attacks, in 2011. Read it and weep.

ONLINE OFFENSIVE?

...Are we slowly making inroads against al-Qaeda in the tribal areas on the Afghan-Pakistan border or is al-Qaeda growing more secure and empowered? Over the past week or two, I’ve read several diametrically opposed stories on this subject.

Which brings to mind dueling articles in The Washington Post and The New York Times which ask, in effect, is al-Qaeda winning over hearts and minds with an escalating presence on the Internet (as Craig Whitlock suggests in the Post) or is the terrorist group’s online offensive tired and anachronistic (as Daniel Kimmage writes in the Times)?

AND I HIGHLY RECOMMEND…

Two Hunter Thompson epics out this weekend –

The new documentary, Gonzo, bursing with insight and energy, is now in theaters. CLICK HERE to see the killer trailer.

And William McKeen, chair of the journalism department at the University of Florida, Gailesville, has just published, Outlaw Journalist. Gonzo and Outlaw make a great, spiked one-two punch for Independence Day.

Today I posted this piece on the Getty Images News Blog, having been kindly invited to offer a short essay about the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund (deadline July 15!) by Getty's Peggy Willett...

(From the Getty News Blog):

In 2008, as they have every summer for 28 years, a committee of three judges will convene in a stifling conference room in Manhattan to plow through piles of photographs and proposals. When they emerge from behind closed doors, after four days of deliberation and two separate rounds of judging, the jury will have chosen the recipient of the W. Eugene Smith Memorial Fund’s annual grant.

At $30,000, the Smith Grant, about to enter its third decade, is arguably photojournalism’s most consistenly prestigious, generous and longest-running award. It is dispensed to a single photographer attempting to complete a significant project conceived in the humanist tradition of renowned photo essayist W. Eugene Smith, who died in 1978. Among the grant’s first 15 recipients, recognized at pivotal, early stages of their careers: Jane Evelyn Atwood, Eugene Richards, Sebastiao Salgado, Gilles Peress, Donna Ferrato, Cristina Garcia Rodero and James Nachtwey.

This year’s deadline is only days away - July 15, 2008.

As you consider applying, please consider this series of questions: Why does W. Eugene Smith matter in this digital age? What is the relevance of his essay “Spanish Village” in the era of the video village? What is the relevance of Nurse Midwife in the age of WebMD?

I would argue that Smith’s commitment to documentary, humanistic photography speaks volumes to today’s young, brash, visually sophisticated (and over-stimulated) generation. Here was a man with a gargantuan appetitie for life and for new experiences. He had a compulsion for clutter and disarray and, at times, a tendency to let his finances slide. He was forever getting in fights with his editors, insisting that they were undermining his pure, single-minded vision. Indeed, Smith’s disdain for authority and outright contempt for authority figures, his unbending adhesion to principle, his commitment to righteous causes, and his explorations in myriad realms of modern culture (especially his passion for jazz) suggest that Smith, the journalist, the artist and the man, might as well have been a paradigm for the 21st century twenty or thirty something photographer.

Smith’s seminal 1972 study of a blighted Japanese village, “Minimata” documented how industry’s wastes had ravaged the land and the local population, killing hundreds and maiming many more. Like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring before it “Minimata,” was the photographic medium’s first clarion call for ecological action. Had Smith shot only this one photo-essay, he would be conveying a message that is perhaps even more significant today: industrialization and rapid technological advances continue to manufacture “Minimatas” at an alarming rate, on a global scale. And photography - whether in digital or traditional format - remains an essential tool for stirring the world to witness and respond.

Both Smith, the photographer, and the Smith fund itself, thirty years after his death, remain beacons of compassion and commitment, reaffirming the power of the lone visionary in these turbulent times.

I encourage photographers everywhere to seriously consider applying this year. If you aren’t telling stories and opening eyes and waking people up, why are you in this business anyway?

...And speaking of prizes...

Last night was the opening of the World Press Photo exhibition, in the Visitor's Lobby of the United Nations in Manhattan. The show displays the work of this year's winners, chosen from among 80,000 images submitted by photographers from 125 nations. The single frame selected as World Press Photo of the Year: Tim Hetherington's study of an exhausted American soldier on the front lines in Afghanistan - shot on assignment for Vanity Fair.

A duplicate World Press Photo exhibition, featuring reproductions of the same images, will open next week in both Shanghai and Reykjavik.

...And finally...

My last two posts on VanityFair.com's group blog, were about the unbearable "presidentiality" of John Sidney McCain III and about possible design tweaks for the revamped Wall Street Journal.

To wit, from VanityFair.com's graphics wizards...

As all of us in the journalist community mourn the loss of NBC's Tim Russert, I was particularly moved by the heartfelt comments of Vanity Fair colleague Christopher Hitchens.

CHECK IT OUT. Multimedia artist and educator Hasan Elahi was detained by authorities at the Detroit Metro airport in the months after the September 11 attacks. A Rutgers professor at the time, he was entirely innocent of any wrong-doing. But for months, the F.B.I. interrogated him, forcing him to take nine polygraph tests before they determined that he was not a threat to national security. As an obsessive counterpoint to this pointless detention and as a way of lampooning what he perceived as the government's invasion of his privacy, Elahi decided to telegraph his comings and goings in a visual biographical blog ad absurdum, informing the F.B.I. – and the rest of us – of every movement in his life, no matter how trivial. (Elahi.org is an online compilation of his work.)

…Photo-centric site BagNewsNotes, courtesy of Michael Shaw, continues to focus inventively on visual culture.

…Tim Barber, former photo mayven at Vice, fresh from his transporting (and sometimes laugh-out-loud/smack-the-forehead brilliant) exhibition, “Various Photographs,” at the New York Photo Festival in DUMBO in May, continues to thrill visitors to his mag-photoblog-electronic-exhibition-online-gallery-melange, TinyVices.com.

OFF-LINE…I highly recommend Firefight: Inside the Battle to Save the Pentagon on 9/11, which I read in galleys several months ago, and which has just been published by Ballantine. Authors Patrick Creed (a firefighter and historian) and Rick Newman (of U.S. News & World Report) weave a heretofore-untold tale of remarkable heroes and of unconscionable hubris (on the part of a few small-minded bit players) by splicing together first-person accounts and first-rate reporting, technical assessments and scenes of internecine squabbles and standoffs that kept various agencies from working together in the days and weeks after the assault on the Pentagon.

And in the REAL WORLD, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has finally had his day in court, six and a half years after the attacks. And presidential hopeful John McCain, the man who may keep U.S. troops in the fertile Tigris and Euphrates unto the next millennium, has expressed his unwavering support for wiretapping-without-a-warrant. Heaven help us. I’ll take Inexperienced Barack over Big Brother the Elder, any day.

Cornell Capa, founder of Manhattan's International Center of Photography (ICP), photographer for Life and member of the Magnum Photo Agency, passed away in his sleep last night at the age of 90.

Cornell was a visionary, coining the phrase "concerned photography" (for documentary work that addressed social issues), forever championing the careers of up-and-coming photographers, and anticipating the cultural significance and intrinsic value of the still photograph in a media-saturated age by starting up the ICP in 1974 - two years after the weekly Life magazine succumbed, in part, to the rise of television, and during a period in which only one or two New York City galleries were devoted entirely to photography.

Online accounts of his life can be read by Richard Pyle, of the Associated Press, Philip Gefter, of The New York Times, and at the Web sites of Magnum Photos, and the ICP. As Philip Gefter notes, it was the battlefield death of Cornell's brother, photojournalist Robert Capa, in Southeast Asia, in 1954, that prompted the younger Capa to observe: “From that day, I was haunted by the question of what happens to the work a photographer leaves behind, by how to make the work stay alive.” The ICP, and a fund set up by Cornell Capa in his brother's memory, were attempts to answer that question.

Yet another photographic giant has fallen, his life now replaced by his legacy, leaving us with a bounty of memories and images.

Click HERE to see a selection of Cornell Capa's photographs.

(Herewith: an homage, "Let Us Now Praise Capa," by yours truly at VanityFair.com.)