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 Rockefeller Center. On this particular day, they humored a photographer, who was drumming up excitement about the projects near completion. Some of the photos were of the tradesmen tossing a football, and a few pretending 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 recognized as “Men at lunch”. It represents the working people of the Great Depression through a single photograph. The following paper will discuss this photograph through realism, color, and scale. It will also analyze the figures of the picture because of how important they are for the viewer to understand the meaning of 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 had.

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 authenticity throughout the photo. Misery is shown in the picture because we can see that in the background the color is washed out, which represents the fog, which is most, related with impoverishment. On the other hand, the color used for the eleven workers stands out which allows the viewer to see that they are not posing for the photo, through their actions and visual expressions. Those adjectives are the clear definition of the picture because as we can see and as said before, they are eating on a steel beam without protection. What this 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 had serious consequences for the United States economy. This created pessimistic expectations about the future that compressed their investments, 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 individual investors to have the ability 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 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 pay 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. Since the ironworkers are on the top of the buildings we can assume 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 to the figures in the picture, we can see that their clothes are quite old and are not similar with the clothes that ironworkers wear nowadays. If we did not have the eleven ironworkers sitting on the steel beam, the viewer could not relate this picture with the Great Depression. 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. Another observation of the figures is that they are reading newspapers, compared to the workers of 2016 who would be reading their cell phones. The figures of the photo are pivotal for the viewer to understand the context in which the picture was taken.

To conclude, after analyzing the characteristics of the picture, the viewer can now better relate what was happening in the photo to the events of the era. As previously mentioned the realism, color, scale and figures are important when analyzing a picture. In addition, the author, by taking the photo has influenced various citizens in relation to the real that workers had to deal with during this time. Prior to this picture, people in that time and now may not have realized about the safety hazards that workers were exposed too. This photo has a lot of meanings, it was taking as an advertisement for a building, it became a spectacle of change for workers’ safety and gives people the capability to look back in history.  
