Dusk After Dusk is a chapbook written by Alireza Bayat and published as part of the exhibition Can the Afghan Speak (Kunsthall 3,14, Bergen, 2024). Moving between the iconic photograph of the 9/11 ‘falling man’ and the undocumented falling of Afghan refugees from departing aircraft in 2021, the essay examines how photography crystallizes the moment before the fall — and what the unequal aesthetic afterlives of these images reveal about whose deaths are remembered and whose are marketed.
Instead of Introduction
I fear height. It is a mental health condition called Acrophobia. It is described in most of the medical textbooks as an intense fear of heights that can cause significant anxiety and panic. Because of this panic, a made-up rationale of mine constantly reiterates that we are not designed for the heights. As a result, I tend to stay away from every location and thought that may trigger this panic. Due to this very superficial argument, I may imagine that there should be some other overlooked factors involved in an image of a story of human kind choosing to fall down from a height. This should be a factor much bigger and deeper than the mere pathological descriptions of anxiety disorders. A complicated outcome of transcendental levels of anxiety that leads to only one possible corridor to the way out. This is crystallized in a certain moment of space and time. Photography is the one medium that governs this quality of fixing and crystalizing. Thus, I argue that images depicting this very critical moment of human existence — like the ones here — are unconsciously leaping beyond the mere mechanical reproduction or acts of documenting, no matter what their primordial intention was. In the ones connected to the politico-historical references and a body of paratextual materials — mainly here the falling man and falling Afghans — this might be regarded as a spirit of an epoch which is manifested through the photographic image going beyond its traditional usage. In this sense photography is not utilized but rather utilizes the soaring levels of an epoch to herald the destruction and maybe emergence of a new era. This does not prescribe how the epoch ought to have been but rather manifests the reality of the era. This very moment could be regarded as the owl of Minerva that spreads its wings only with the coming of the dusk. In another words, this shows exactly the falling down of a period — in individual cases — or an epoch — in broader cases. All the images here are the unique moments of encounter and suspension just before the fall while they acquire varied meaning and perceptions. I will try to take a look at these varied qualities, while the common ground is defined, in the proceeding lines.
Falling Down of Humanity
A person is not supposed to fall down from a height. This is a frightening, uncanny phenomenon in every other man’s perception. Fear is related to the existential threat that a certain viewer might feel, but on the other side, the one suspended should have felt extremely desperate to choose a grave danger over another one. This other one could be a matter of scrutiny, as it may not be the same for every man’s falling. The famous image of the falling man¹, related to one of the victims of the terrorist attacks of World Trade Center on 9/11, is now one of the iconic examples of such uncanny conditions. The falling man in the image taken by Richard Drew of the Associated Press depicts a man head-down with a background of the targeted towers’ facade. In terms of desperation, based on the facts of the attacks, the man must have taken this path because of a fear of objective death surrounding him. The person is not only shocked but is tasting and observing the horror of a gradual death. In this perceived condition, the falling is not choosing between a way to survival and a way to death, but by throwing his last and most precious asset — his body and existence — out, he is denying an imposed way of death and embracing the other. In addition, this certain image of the falling man is carefully chosen from more than a dozen other shots, possessing a very studio-like specification of aesthetics. This chosen — not certainly chosen by the subject — image, with a certain Western modern art aesthetic, adds different layers of meaning to the notion being communicated. This is still representing a highly sophisticated imagery of a civilized culture in the midst of a barbaric attack. A visual setting of reality, in the dusk of Western civilization. This setting, as a definitive manifesto, makes it easy and rational for the consumer to take all the required measures to confront and prevent this fear and level of anxiety.
One way out from this extreme is to relocate this existing disorder to there — where it is coming from, where the chaos is normalized, where death has lost its shocking features, where all the dimensions of life are wrapped in death. This relocation and bold differentiation are thus the only way to reclaim the composition of Western order — like the one in the falling man’s photo — back.
Falling Man, photograph by Richard Drew / Associated Press.
Two Red Circles, Two Stains
Twenty years after the relocation of death — the hot ball no one wants to hold — to there, and years after the mission was accomplished², the last US aircraft was taking off from Kabul’s Hamid Karzai Airport while a group of Afghan youth were still lingering on the plane. Later the world learned that two of these young men, who managed to stay on the outer parts of the plane, fell down while the aircraft was in Kabul’s sky. Here, comparatively, I seek the reason behind this way out in the same way. While the objective death approaching was the reason for the falling man, here it seems that no immediate objective death is involved. Here, one should think, there is an all-pervasive spirit of death involved. In such a war-ground of the world, the expectation of objective death seems banal, as there is hardly anything out of the realm of death that makes a significant change. Death is everywhere, like the low-frequency sounds that surround you while you don’t necessarily hear them. I would also argue that these desperate bodies are throwing — this time — themselves into a possible virtue of life out of that contaminated air of domesticized terror, towards the promised lands of the North, which was also subjectively constructed for them. In a simplified form, subjective death is even more dreadful than objective death, in a context where the rarity of death still makes room for the aesthetic values of its representation. No professional photographer would capture shots of them — the falling Afghans — so he could later choose an aesthetically correct version. Because one never captures what is lived, but tends to capture what is exceptional, what is rare. This unusual, restless boarding leads to two circled dots that are hardly seen in the only haphazard and accidental documentation of their falling.
Although in all the images — as said in the beginning — falling is the chorus line, the conditions of representation in the Afghan variation show the importance and value of their meaning for the world out there. People are just dots — barely detectable — in comparison to the huge American plane. There are no skyscrapers in Kabul, so they can only fall on the loose ceilings of Kabul’s slums. Torn like many other bodies scattered on the ground, with the only difference being that this time they were falling from the sky. No one is touched emotionally enough to erect a statue of flying Afghans, in a context where bodies are the embodiments of the hunger-coated death that is busy shaping almost everything silently, like an eternally lasting wind.
The situation in which one needs to be marked by a red circle to draw the viewer’s attention reveals a difference in existential value compared to lives that are ideologically remembered and recalled. Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man imagines a performance artist who re-enacts the pose of the World Trade Center’s falling figures in public, unannounced, across the city — a fictional gesture that returns to those stark moments when people fell or were forced to jump.
Eric Fischl’s sculpture and poem, made in response to 9/11, likewise freezes a single moment before impact.
Another variation of Eric Fischl’s statue, among eight others. They search for a sphere out of death — not necessarily into life, but into a non-death, possible condition of living.
Instead of Conclusion
Based on the imagery, and taking both extreme differences and similarities in common, I would like to mention the existence of a certain notion of poverty which contributes, to some extent, to the notions of aesthetics already discussed. There is a certain gap of poverty, both in the linguistic and pictorial realms. The ones falling from Kabul’s sky are, at their best, a commercialized-humiliation image of the uncivilized globe that can be easily marketed in other parts of the world, while the figure of 9/11 is the man, and consequently his fall is the fall of the man. This is defined out of the structures of rhetoric, or, if you like, romanticized figurative speech. The Western aestheticized man can displace and relocate the lost order by regulating other bodies out there, as discussed, while the other end is clearly lacking visual and linguistic qualities of the same level. The only remnant of the Afghans falling from the sky, according to the owner of the house on which they fell, were some smashed organs and two long-remaining stains of blood. Meanwhile, Carolee Schneemann’s work Terminal Velocity, addressing the same falling figures, did not receive very positive feedback after its exhibition post-9/11 — Schneemann later reflected on the discomfort her images caused for American audiences confronting a vulnerability that challenged national myths of invulnerability.
Terminal Velocity by Carolee Schneemann.
These chronologically distant but closely related images might be considered intertwined moments of a failure of a failure, where those aimed at reconstructing and re-erecting are dropping off and demolishing constantly, trapped in a fundamentalist dogma — or, as Schneemann calls such patterns, myths — of a certain authenticity and originality. Dusk, coming after dusk.
Endnotes
This is the branded name of the photo among mainstream US media channels.
With reference to George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” televised speech aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, six weeks after the invasion of Iraq, in 2003.
Bibliography
Healthline. “Acrophobia, or Fear of Heights: Symptoms, Causes, and Treatment.” 27 Mar. 2019.
DeLillo, Don. Falling Man. First Scribner hardcover edition, Scribner, 2007.
“Owl of Minerva.” Oxford Reference. Accessed 5 June 2023.
Schwarz, Gabrielle. “Intimate Contact: Images of Suffering in the Work of Carolee Schneemann.” Another Gaze: A Feminist Film Journal, 7 Mar. 2019.
“The Story Behind the Haunting 9/11 Photo of the Falling Man.” Time, 8 Sept. 2016.