Famous And Not

The New York Public Library has an online collection titled “Photographs of the Empire State Building under construction.” I expect that I will be revisiting it after today’s excursion…

A famous picture by Lewis Hine:

Hine called the photo “Icarus” and it’s been sometimes called “Skyboy.” The worker is a rigger working on steel erection. The angle makes it look like he’s flying, but the working platform can be seen at the lower left. Don’t get me wrong: this was dangerous. Working on the cables by riding them like that meant he could theoretically fall to his death at any time if he slipped, even if he wasn’t as far out in the middle of the air as it seems.

As they used to say in high school, compare and contrast:

Another Hine photo of another rigger working on cables without a safety line. Again, the background is very far in the distance – in this case looking north to Midtown and Central Park rather than west to the Hudson River – and again we only see the edge of the working platform. So why is the first picture iconic and the second one not? It must be said that the rigger in the first is, by usual standards, better-looking than the rigger in the second, but I don’t think that’s the only difference. Climbing the cable, even by a few feet, looks much less safe than standing on a beam and holding a cable, even if both (a) are very dangerous by modern standards and (b) were an ordinary part of a rigger’s day in 1931.