Lewis Hine’s photographs of the Empire State Building document the technological achievement of that era’s tallest building and celebrate the human skill and courage that went into its construction. In this photograph, a man is seen working on one of the many derricks, or cranes, used in the construction of the Empire State Building. Hine had to lean out from the platform in order to capture the worker in action, who maneuvers the pipe pictured in the lower right corner.
In the early 1930s, to document the construction of the Empire State Building, Hine accompanied the building’s workers as they constructed what would become the tallest building in the world at the time. For this photograph, Hine carefully positioned himself on the steel skeleton of the skyscraper. The vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines, in both the stance of the derrick man and the steel structure, balance the composition. The close-up also frames the figure; the vertical steel beams, providing a seemingly secure foundation for the worker. In reality, the man’s elevated position is more dangerous than it appears in the photograph.
Hine’s empathy for human labor marks his entire career. An ardent advocate for the use of photography in education, he photographed the immigrants at Ellis Island in order to teach his students the same regard for contemporary immigrants as they had for the Pilgrims. He also documented child labor factories, knitting mills, mines, agriculture, and the street. From 1917 to 1920, Hine traveled to Europe documenting postwar civilians and refugees for the American Red Cross.
In 1930, Hine accepted the job of documenting the construction of the Empire State Building. In his late 50s, he climbed with the “sky boys” floor by floor, balancing his equipment on girders and swinging out in a basket at the hundredth floor to capture views from the top of the structure.
My six months of skyscraping have culminated in a few extra thrills and finally achieving a record of the Highest Up when I was pushed and pulled up onto the peak of the Empire State, the highest point yet reached on a man-made structure. The day before, just before the high derrick was taken down, they swung me out in a box from the hundredth floor – a sheer drop of nearly a quarter of a mile – to get some shots of the tower. The boss argued that it had never been done and could never be done again and that, anyway, it’s safer than a ride on a Pullman or a walk in the city streets.¹
1. Walter and Naomi Rosenblum, America and Lewis Hine (Millertown, N.Y.: Aperture, Inc., 1977), p. 106.
