Click here for the slide:http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/glass-in-front-clouds-below/
If Slide 1 doesn’t make your heart skip a beat, you are either beyond fearless, a professional window washer or both. And if it doesn’t make your heart ache a bit, you may not remember that Roko Camaj, an Albanian immigrant who adored his job washing windows at the World Trade Center — so infectiously that he became the subject of a children’s book — was killed on Sept. 11, 2001.
No one could have anticipated peril of that magnitude. But window washing in a city of skyscrapers is an inherently dramatic subject. Very few other laborers report to work at such tenuous precipices. They clear panoramas for the rest of us by putting their lives and limbs on the line.
Who could blame Edward Massey for looking as nervous as he did in the November 1972 photo by Robert Walker? (Mr. Massey is in the newsboy cap in Slide 6, drawing on a cigarette.) A steel cable holding the scaffold on which he and his partner were standing had snapped 53 stories over Times Square, at 1 Astor Plaza. One end of it, unattached and swinging crazily, smashed through a window on the 52nd floor, opening an escape route through which the two — unhurt — were able to clamber into the office building.
Mr. Walker’s photo has everything: the anxious window washer, the hard-working recovery crew, the terrifyingly askew scaffold and a sense, in the distance, of just how high up this scene is set. We can even see a pair of suction lifters in the center foreground. As inherently photogenic as the subject of window washing might be, ingenuity and timing are still required to take a good picture — as is the ability to recognize that the best vantage may not yield the best image.
Sara Krulwich was assigned in August 1994 to photograph Mr. Camaj at 2 World Trade Center. “I joined him on the outside of the building,” she recalled. “The experience of putting on a safety belt and stepping into a little bucket attached to the outside of a World Trade tower was one I will always remember. It was one of those amazing New York experiences that make this job so great.”
Back on earth, and looking at the contact sheets, Ms. Krulwich and her editors realized that the pictures taken alongside Mr. Camaj weren’t as successful in showing the panoramic context of his job as those taken from inside the building.
Luck can play a role. For instance, Marilynn K. Yee didn’t set out in January 2006 to create an Abstract Expressionist portrait of the window washer Ricardo Espejo in a cameo role as George Washington (Slide 8). Her assignment was simply to shoot a new store on Broome Street called Despaña. Mr. Espejo just happened to show up for work. “I thought it was a strong image,” Ms. Yee said, “and was able to capture the soapy suds and the patterns of movements and shadows as he worked.”
Persistence, too, is a factor. In August 2006, Fred R. Conrad climbed a 12-foot ladder on the rooftop of 7 World Trade Center in order to clear the edge of the parapet and shoot straight down as Paul Aspuru and Oleh Hulyas washed windows overlooking ground zero. The photo (Slide 8) was never published. Mr. Conrad is undaunted, since the trade center site in the background looks so very different today.
“I want now more than ever to rephotograph the window washers, so that there will be a record five years apart,” he said last week. “I think it could be stunning.”
For those who remember Mr. Camaj up at these altitudes, however, the scene will seem a bit empty.
