Photos- Andrew Hardy

The World Trade Center attacks had a profound impact on most Americans. But this tragedy did more then cause a war. The United States were already involved within Afghanistan, and the invasion of Iraq had little to do with terrorist organizations. The impact was far more personal. It is more then the fact that it happened on the soil of the States, although that does explain why hundreds of thousands of civilians die on foreign lands that are irrelevant to most of our lives. What shook us about the 9/11 attacks was how it attacked our very lives. Footage of the destruction permeated every television screen, and continues to do a decade after the attack. Falling Man illustrates this personal aspect. The subject is more then a statistic or a burning building, it's a person, alone, -falling to their death. Don Delillo examined this phenomenon in his 2007 novel Falling Man and the short story within Still Life. He uses words to attempt to address that sense of loss. One of the anecdotes within that story is on "organic shrapnel", small pieces of suicide bombers that imbed themselves within victims. And it seems to me that this sense of loneliness and loss is going to continue unless people can find more personal forms of connection besides killing each other.