Images of Sept. 11

This NPR report by Karen Grigsby Bates (9/8/06 - 5:23) features an interview with David Friend, the editor of a new book of 9/11 images, Watching the World Change. The interview with Bates focuses not on the famous, often-reproduced Thomas Franklin image shown here (although Friend does discuss this image at the NPR Web site) but the much more disturbing image of one the jumpers, a man plummeting to his death, taken by Richard Drew.

We learn in the piece that not many American newspapers elected to publish this. "Pictures of that sort of power tend to be foreign images," Friend says. "[Americans] don't tend to want to see our own dying before our eyes."

Classroom thoughts

There is a world of difference in the two photographs. While it is easy to see these differences, it may be a bit more difficult to articulate them for others--why are eyes are drawn to one image and averted from the other.

• What do you think about decision of newspapers editors not to publish the Drew photograph?
  
  
• Here's a link to an NPR piece on cell phone photos taken after the London subway bombings in August 2005. What do you think of the proposition that such photographs are going to change how we understand history?