A building under construction, photographed against a sky the colour of sodium light. Everything nearer than the sky is black: the concrete floors stacked one above another, the lift shaft, the sheeting, and over all of it a cage of scaffolding poles rising past the topmost slab into empty air. Five or six men are at work on it. Two stand near the top, one with both arms flung out; the others are lower down, bent to something we cannot see.
The scaffolding is what the photograph is about, and the men are what makes it legible. Poles and couplers repeat at intervals the eye can measure, and against that grid a human figure becomes a unit of scale — suddenly the structure has a height, and the height is considerable. Photography performs this conversion better than any other medium and cannot resist doing it. Remove the workers and the picture is a pattern; leave them in and it is a report.
The man with his arms open is the difficulty. He may be balancing, or signalling, or stretching after an hour bent over — the photograph does not know and cannot be made to say. It offers a silhouette at a great height with its arms out, at the end of a working day, and leaves the rest to us. That reticence is not a failure of the picture. It is the whole of what the camera had to give.
A building under construction, photographed against a sky the colour of sodium light. Everything nearer than the sky is black: the concrete floors stacked one above another, the lift shaft, the sheeting, and over all of it a cage of scaffolding poles rising past the topmost slab into empty air. Five or six men are at work on it. Two stand near the top, one with both arms flung out; the others are lower down, bent to something we cannot see.
The scaffolding is what the photograph is about, and the men are what makes it legible. Poles and couplers repeat at intervals the eye can measure, and against that grid a human figure becomes a unit of scale — suddenly the structure has a height, and the height is considerable. Photography performs this conversion better than any other medium and cannot resist doing it. Remove the workers and the picture is a pattern; leave them in and it is a report.
The man with his arms open is the difficulty. He may be balancing, or signalling, or stretching after an hour bent over — the photograph does not know and cannot be made to say. It offers a silhouette at a great height with its arms out, at the end of a working day, and leaves the rest to us. That reticence is not a failure of the picture. It is the whole of what the camera had to give.