A few photos from the early thirties of the last century, where a team of fitters have a rest and lunch on a massive I-beam, still arouse admiration and a lot of discussion. There are several reasons for this.
Firstly, the plot, indeed, more than extraordinary, and secondly, it is still argued who is the author of these photos? Another question – are they real builders or professional acrobats? And the most important one – is it not a photomontage?
There are three pictures plus one. On three – the direct heroes – high-rise workers, and on one more – the photographer himself, focusing the camera. The photograph of the alleged author of the high-rise masterpieces himself raises the next in a chain of questions – who photographed him?
The events of the shooting take place on the still unfinished Rockefeller Centre building, one of the buildings of the famous GE Buildings skyscraper complex. The maximum height of the buildings is almost two hundred and sixty metres. The I-beam on which the workers are sitting is one of the power beams of the sixty-ninth floor.
Expert examinations of the authorship of the photo continued up to the beginning of two thousand years, in the end the author was recognised as Charles Ebets, but soon the conclusions of the experts were challenged and the result of the examinations in terms of determining the author was cancelled. So, we still don’t know which of the photographers actually dared such a risky reportage shooting.
But the second part of the expertise remained valid. Its conclusions state that the shooting was clearly staged, even though it was done at an incredible height. It was an advert commissioned by Rockefeller, the main sponsor of skyscraper construction. Experts have even unearthed a message from one of the builders to his wife, in which he attached a photograph of him on the beam to a letter, signing it with the humour: ‘And here I am, as usual, with a bottle’.
In any case, even the presence of retouching on the photos does not cast doubt on the fearlessness of the participants and does not detract from the significance of these masterpieces of photography today.
