Forgetting Man

A digital image rots. A narrative unravels. Memory slips.

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In Forgetting Man, I engage in a slow, deliberate experiment with decay—both material and conceptual. At its center lies Richard Drew’s The Falling Man, one of the most unsettling and iconic photographs of the 21st century. Taken on September 11, 2001, it captures a man mid-fall from the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The image, suspended between horror and serenity, has haunted me—and many others—for years.

My process is deceptively simple: I repost and screenshot the same image 1,140 times on Instagram. But the result is transformative. Each new iteration loses fidelity, clarity, and coherence—until the image, once sharply defined, is stripped down to a ghostly residue. Over time, what remains resembles a skeleton: a fragile structure of light and noise, holding on to its form even as its story dissolves.

This deterioration mirrors a biological process—like the decomposition of a body. The image rots. It forgets itself.

With this gesture, I seek to dismantle the illusion of indestructibility that clings to digital images. There is a widespread belief that digital memory is infinite, that once something is uploaded, it is forever. But in Forgetting Man, I turn this belief inside out. Even in the cloud, images are vulnerable—not just to deletion, but to erosion through overexposure, repetition, and the passage of time. Their narratives thin. Their meanings fray.

The work questions what happens when memory fades not through sudden loss, but through slow saturation. When an image is consumed endlessly, what is left of its ability to speak? At what point does visibility turn into forgetting?

This project is also an intimate investigation of my own fascination with The Falling Man. Why does this image grip me? What makes it so iconic? What does it allow us to see—and what does it compel us to ignore? In Forgetting Man, I interrogate the image’s power, but also my complicity in its circulation.

In her 1973 book On Photography, Susan Sontag wrote:

“Photographs, which turn the past into a consumable object, are a shortcut.”

Sontag’s critique feels even more urgent today. In the age of social media and algorithmic feeds, images become not just consumable but disposable—looping endlessly, severed from their contexts, degraded through digital noise. Photographs now function less as vessels of memory than as fragments in a torrent of visual information. They are remembered precisely because they are repeated. And they are forgotten for the same reason.

The digital image is democratic, replicable, and, paradoxically, ephemeral. In Forgetting Man, I confront this paradox by taking one of the most reproduced photographs of our time and pushing it beyond its threshold of recognizability. I create a space where forgetting becomes visible. A slow unraveling. A hollowing out.

This is not an act of erasure, but of exposure—of making visible what it means for something to fade, to break down, to become something else.

In the end, Forgetting Man is a meditation on the fragility of memory, the violence of repetition, and the quiet dignity of images that die slowly.