In the latest (8/25/25) New Yorker, a Jeremy Nguyen cartoon in which some construction workers party in the sky:
(#1) A play on the well-known “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” photo originally taken in New York in 1932 (which I have labeled Skylunch 1; it was followed by a series of Skylunch variants)
Nguyen has 8 men, grouped 2, 2, 2, 1, 1; they are working-class guys in casual dress (caps rather than hard hats, no harnesses), standing (rather than sitting) around with simple party fare (rather than lunch boxes) in their hands. What guy #3 finds remarkable is not that they are standing on a girder suspended far above the city streets, but that they’re getting their little party in what is for them their lunch spot. This is elephantlessness: missing the elephant — in this case, the floating girder — in the situation.
(There’s a Page on this blog with links to my posts on his cartoons.)
From my 12/22/21 posting “Skylunch 4, in Chicago”:
A few years back, members of the Chicago Iron Workers local #1 remade the famous “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” photo originally taken in New York in 1932. In 2017 the two photos — which I’ll label Skylunch 4 and Skylunch 1 — were put together in a composite … on Reddit, which the Chicago Curbed site posted about on 10/17/17.
(#2) Skylunch 4 + Skylunch 1…both photos have 11 men, grouped 2, 2, 3, 3, 1; but the tones of the two photos are very different (Skylunch 1 — in b&w, with a hazy Manhattan in the background, with mostly recent immigrant steelworkers — is a piece of magic realism, expressing ambitious dreams of a truly modern Manhattan rising into the sky; Skylunch 4 — in sharp color, with the solid buildings of the 20th century in the Loop constantly in restless revision, with American-born steelworkers, Union guys, in their harnesses and hard hats — is a piece of everyday urban realism, regular guys doing a tough job
August 21, 2025 at 6:00 pm |
I was seriously tempted to introduce the antic German technical term Elefantenlosigkeit ‘elephantlessness’. It has *much* better prosody than the English.
August 22, 2025 at 3:38 pm |
The photo always gives me an odd, queasy feeling deep in the gut. The men are so high and unsecured, and their feet are dangling …
Interestingly, Wikipedia says the photographer responsible is not known with certainty. Plus it was a publicity photo, so I wonder how realistic the lunch was.
Others could comment better on the use of light and dark, focus, shapes, angles and so on, but the one cable at the right cleverly brings connection with the rest of the construction. (Some versions of the photo also show parts of other girders.)
It occurs to me now that, even though this was taken over 200m above the ground, it is unlikely that this girder just extended out into the void. Rather, there was probably other girders and completed structures directly below, perhaps only a few metres below, out of the frame of the photo. Dangerous, of course, but not necessarily eye-wateringly so.
It’s a nice use of ‘atop’ too.
August 22, 2025 at 5:32 pm |
You write: “The photo always gives me an odd, queasy feeling deep in the gut.”
I’m a serious acrophobe, so it takes a lot of grit for me to contemplate these photos and post about them.