100 PHOTOGRAPHS 69
Stanley Forman was working for the Boston Herald Ameri-
can on July 22, 1975, when he got a call about a fire on
Marlborough Street. He raced over in time to see a woman
and child on a fifth-floor fire escape. A fireman had set
out to help them, and Forman figured he was shooting an-
other routine rescue. “Suddenly the fire escape gave way,”
he recalled, and Diana Bryant, 19, and her goddaughter
Tiare Jones, 2, were swimming through the air. “I was
shooting pictures as they were falling—then I turned away.
It dawned on me what was happening, and I didn’t want
to see them hit the ground. I can still remember turning
around and shaking.” Bryant died from the fall, her body
cushioning the blow for her goddaughter, who survived.
While the event was no different from the routine tragedies
that fill the local news, Forman’s picture of it was. Using a
motor-drive camera, Forman was able to freeze the hor-
rible tumbling moment down to the expression on young
Tiare’s face. The photo earned Forman the Pulitzer Prize
and led municipalities around the country to enact tougher
fire-escape-safety codes. But its lasting legacy is as much
ethical as temporal. Many readers objected to the publica-
tion of Forman’s picture, and it remains a case study in the
debate over when disturbing images are worth sharing.