You've seen it a thousand times. Eleven ironworkers, sat side by side on a steel girder, eating their lunch 840 feet above Manhattan, the city spread out like a carpet below them. Lunch on a Beam (also known as Lunch Atop a Skyscraper) is one of the most reproduced photographs in history. It hangs in college dorms and union halls, corner pubs and corner offices. It's been parodied, recreated and imitated endlessly. And yet, for nearly a century, no one could say with certainty who took it.
That's the central mystery at the heart of Lunch on a Beam: The Making of an American Photograph (Brandeis University Press, £27), a new book by Christine Roussel, the longtime archivist at New York’s Rockefeller Center. Roussel spent more than seven years, dozens of interviews and a fair amount of luck piecing together the full story behind the image. What she found is fascinating not just as social history, but as a detective story for anyone who cares about photography.
