As the photographer looked up at men doing precarious work on a scaffold high above the ground, he captured a scene that has monumentality and is also exquisite. Eli Siegel explained that “the exquisite deals with the trembling drama… between matter and space.”
This massive brick building takes up the full frame of the photograph, yet the way it is bathed in light has us see its multitude of bricks shimmering in exquisite relief.
We feel the weight of the scaffold hanging in space and yet its thin, dark diagonal line has delicacy. Surprisingly, what holds this composition together are the geometric shadows cast upon the silvery grey façade, including that small triangular one in the lower right corner. This photograph honors the meaning of those workers on a wall and is a means of our seeing with greater respect and wonder the monumentality of their work.
—Donita Ellison