ICONS
One September day in 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, the
PR team for one of the world’s wealthiest clans set out to fan excite-
ment for the family’s latest project: Rockefeller Center, some 6 million
square feet of skyscraper space built on 22 acres in the heart of Man-
hattan. The team took a lot of photos that day, but only one became
iconic. It showed 11 men sitting casually on a girder 800 feet above the
pavement. They chat, scan newspapers, cadge a light, all while dangling
their feet in an ocean of thin air. Lunch Atop a Skyscraper suggests the
peril that yawned in 1932, when America, and the world, dangled over
an abyss. And it contains the crazy confidence of a nation that knew the
gravest danger was fear itself.
Iconic photographs lodge first in the viscera, then move to the brain tounpack their meanings. Nat Fein’s forlorn image of Babe Ruth’s last appear-
ance in Yankee Stadium, his luster eclipsed by time and cancer, contains
all there is to know about the paths of glory. When James VanDerZee’s
picture of black New Yorkers in furs was discovered in 1969, it reanimated
the Harlem Renaissance in a way no shelf of books could do. The catastro-
phe of the aids epidemic can be felt in a glimpse of Therese Frare’s picture
of David Kirby on his deathbed.
A photograph is, in a sense, the fossil version of light, a kind of timemachine bringing a moment of the past forward while ferrying the present
into the past. Iconic photographs, like those of the fossils of Olduvai Gorge,
record more than a jawbone or a footprint. They suggest a world.