Claim: Photograph shows man falling from a skyscraper while occupants grasp at him through a window.
Status: False.
Origins: If you think the above-displayed image of a man falling outside a skyscraper while several of the building's occupants desperately grasp at him through an opened window seems too fantastic too be real ... you're right.
The distinctively-shaped building seen in the background places the setting of this photograph in downtown Beijing, and this image is in fact the work of photographic/performance artist Li Wei, a 36-year-old resident of Beijing who specializes in "site-specific performance pieces that enact strange fantasies such as a head flying solo around Beijing or bodies catapulted into car windows."
This particular image is from a 2003 Li Wei work entitled "Free Degree Over 29th Storey." A Theme Magazine profile of the artist described how the finished effect was accomplished:
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| Li Wei's body appears to float from a window on the 29th floor of Beijing's Jianwai SOHO office complex. In the image, his body is held in gravity-defying suspension. Arms outstretched, body rigidly horizontal, Li appears on the threshold of either soaring miraculously among the skyscrapers of Beijing’s Central Business District, or plummeting gloriously like a modern day Bellerophon to a horrifying dénouement. The work, like many of Li's performances, was achieved with the aid of invisible wires, mirrors, and scaffolding. The resulting photograph of the event has been retouched to efface any traces of the architecture in this staging. This effort has been made to demonstrate, as Li puts it, "the reality in the unreal or fantastic." These photographs do not capture reality but, rather, suggest to us the constructed nature of what we assume to be real. | |
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