On September 20, 1932, high above 41st Street in Manhattan, eleven ironworkers took part in a daring publicity stunt. The men were accustomed to walking along the girders of the RCA building (now called the GE building) they were constructing in Rockefeller Center. On this particular day, though, they humored a photographer, who was drumming up excitement about the projects near completion. Some of the tradesmen tossed a football, a few pretended to nap. But, most famously, all eleven ate lunch on a steel beam, their feet dangling eight hundred and fifty feet above the city’s streets. This picture is known as “Men at lunch”. I am going to use realism, color, and scale to describe the picture, as well as analyze the figures in the photo.

The first factor that captured my attention in the picture is realism. Realism pictures usually have objects and people full of details, which allow us to identify with real life. This picture meets the requirement to be identified with a real picture. As we can see, each person is different from the other, wearing different clothes and they are even in different positions. When we talked about cartoons in class, we said that we can identify ourselves with them as they have universal traits that helps us see ourselves. Unlike the cartoons we have talked about in class, this picture has real people, and it is a real situation that prevents us from putting ourselves in their shoes. On the other hand, another characteristic about realism is that we cannot interpret the picture with another meaning than the one the picture is representing by itself. For example, we cannot say that they are having lunch on a steel beam from Spain, because, as we can see in the picture, the buildings belong to New York. Therefore, the author of this picture wants to provoke the viewer by calling their attention to the lack of protection these workers have to work.

The second characteristic we can observe from the picture is that the principal colors are black, white, and grey. Those colors tend to represent misery and purity. Those adjectives are the clear definition of the picture because as we can see and as I said before, they are eating on a steel beam without protection. What means is that they do not have enough money to protect their workers. At the same time, the fact that it is a picture taken in black and white allows us to characterize it as an old picture, and furthermore, place it in a particular historical context. In this case, we can place it in the “Great Depression” era, where the stock market collapsed and has serious consequences for the United States economy. This created pessimistic expectations about the future that compressed consumption and investment and destroyed the savings of many families and impoverished them. In addition to, it interrupted the financing of companies that faced a declining demand, and hurt the ability of financial institutions that had lent to institutional and individual investors to buy securities. However, the most important consequence of the “Great Depression” was that immigrants accepted jobs even if they were dangerous.

The third characteristic I am going to talk about is scale. As we can see, the steel beam where the eleven workers are sitting is placed in the middle of the image. As the workers are placed in the middle of the picture we can deduce that it is the main point. If we play close attention to the workers, we can see that the author focused his camera solely on the eleven ironworkers. As we look further, in the background we can see that the buildings belong to New York city however they appear unclear. Also because the ironworkers are on the top of the building we can deduce that they are finishing the construction. Relating this back to scale, the author highlights the eleven ironworkers through how casually they eat lunch above the city.

If we pay attention at the figures of the picture, we can see that their clothes are quite old and it is not similar with the clothes that ironworkers work with nowadays. For example, they are wearing regular pants, normal shirts and berets. Nowadays, ironworkers use specific pants and shirts that are more comfortable and allow them to work at a high productivity. 

To conclude, after analyzing the characteristics of the picture, we can prove that what the picture is representing is related to occurrences that were happening in that era. In addition, the author got what he was looking for taking this picture: to provoke an impact on the citizens’ conscience about the conditions where the workers had to work. Due to the consequences of the “Great Depression”, and advertise about the new building they were working on. 
