All the world’s a stage.. all the world’s a play.. we are merely actors.
And even those of heroism and nostalgia that has become ingrained in our American way may have been staged as well…
There is a famous image of Ironworkers being un-phased by heights during the great depression in 1932.. Just eat lunch above New York City on 49th Street..
Photo buffs know the truth behind the classic photo: It was staged. The men in the picture were real ironworkers. They did build the structure that is now the 22nd tallest building in New York City and home to NBC studios. But rather than capture them in the midst of their lunch break, the photographer posed them on the beam for multiple takes — images that were intended as advertising for the new building. Some historians believe there was a sturdy level of the structure, then called the RCA building, just below the frame.
“You see the picture once, you never forget it,” Rockefeller Center archivist Christine Roussel told Time magazine. But “the funniest part about the photographs,” she said, “were they were done for publicity.”
Other photos taken that day show the workers playing football, holding up American flags or pretending to sleep on the steel beam. It was the lunch photo that was published in the New York Herald Tribune that October, seven months before the building would open.
Don’t let that take you away from the meaning of Labor Day.. but keep in mind the notion of rudimentary discernment..
We should never take anything at face value.. The new century features online “deep fakes.”
So did last century.
Except they were in black and white..
🙂
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