“Social photography” was how Lewis W. Hine advertised his services, but his best pictures, such as this one, capture the social by means of a radiant artistry and a remarkable grit, enough to lug a heavy 4-by-5 camera up steep ladders and shoot from an open steel box dangled a quarter mile above the street. Commissioned to document the construction of the Empire State Building, Hine, over the, it doted on the ironworkers on the job, whom Hine dubbed “sky boys”—the gangs of Newfoundlanders, Scandinavians, Irish, and Mohawks who erected the steel skeleton of the building—lifting, positioning, and riveting its fifty-seven thousand tons of steel columns and beams.
