captivating - Michael W. May from twhirl

Absolutely amazing. - Akiva

it's funny, when I was searching for this picture the the night I came across many people writing about it who felt the same way I did. They had come across it one day, unexpectedly, and they were fascinated to the point of obsession. - edythe

A contemporary British poet wrote a book of poems recently called The Fall and passes out copies of the photo at her readings. We had a book of notable Time-Life photographs, and that is where I found it when I was maybe 10. I took a script-writing class the summer after my first year of college and my class screenplay was about a neurotic woman who witnesses something similar on her way to a video dating session. I see an echo of the picture in a poem I wrote later as well. - edythe

wow. Doesn't even seem like it could be real. Quite amazing. - felix

Googling "evelyn mchale" turns up surprisingly little. This FF thread is on the first page of results. - Karim

The stunning thing about the photo is that we have this concept of steel being substantial and hard and permanent, relative to ourselves, and the photo depicts the steel as so much ephemeral tissue paper, and the human being as substantial and permanent. I think we also have have an intuitive understanding of F=ma and sense that there was a hell of a lot of a involved. - Karim

Made me think of David Bowie's, "The Man Who Fell to Earth." - Mark Forman

I got very different search results than you Karim -- didn't see FriendFeed on the first page of results and this was the fourth hit: http://www.nytimes.com/2006... (edit, FriendFeed is on the first page of results if you type the name without quotation marks around it) - Robert Seidman

interesting. I got this FF thread on the first page of results near the bottom. then i opened a new browser window, same query, got this FF thread in the *middle* of the first page of results (it moved up). then I posted the comment about this showing up in the Google search results, and of course it's nowhere to be found now. (waves to Big Brother) - Karim

Karim - yes, that is part of the strangeness of the photo. It seems impossible that you could fall all that way and be completely intact like that, as if the car absorbed everything but her body and face... - edythe