Textual Poaching

One aspect of my identity that I wanted to explore was my “blue collar” working identity.  You may be wondering, “But you’re a college student! You don’t have a blue collar job!” In addition to attending school full-time, I also have a full-time job working at a radar company to produce their marketing videos. This is out of necessity, as I have a mortgage, and it isn’t going to pay itself! Thus, I need to work in order to avoid losing my house. This is why I feel that I identify with the blue collar workers in the photo that I chose to remix.

The photo that I chose to remix is the famous 1932 photograph commonly called, “Lunch atop a Skyscraper.”  The photographer is unknown, but it was taken on September 20, 1932 on the 69^th floor of the RCA building, and it shows eleven men eating lunch, seated on a girder with their feet dangling 840 feet above the New York City streets. The men in the photo aren’t wearing any safety harnesses, which is possibly due to the time when this happened. 1932 was at the height of the Great Depression, and men would commonly take any job they could in order to feed their family, regardless of safety issues. I noticed that the man on the far right of the frame is looking at the camera with a unique expression on his face, and so I chose to do the manipulation on him. The manipulation that I made to the image is that I added a safety harness and safety rope to this man, but none of the others, and then I added the OSHA logo to the photo. OSHA stands for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and it was formed in 1971 to, “assure safe and healthful working conditions for working men and women by setting and enforcing standards and by providing training, outreach, education and assistance."  If OSHA was around in the 1930s, then this would NEVER have happened. They are very strict about safety regulations, and sometimes inconvenience people in order to keep them safe.

I feel that I am a safe person in general; at least I try to be. When I was younger, I was that kid who didn’t want to try the back-flip on the trampoline, because I thought it’d break my neck or something, so by me adding the safety harness and rope and the OSHA logo, I feel that I’ve connected the image back to myself. I don’t go over-the-top when trying to be safety-conscious, but I don’t want myself or others to get hurt doing something, either.

In the article “How Texts Become Real,” the author states that, “…such intense interaction eventually leads many fans toward the creation of new texts, the writing of original stories.” In 2012, director Seán Ó Cualáin directed a documentary film entitled, “Men at Lunch,” that tried to identify the men that were in the famous 1932 photograph. In doing research about the film, I came across the quote, “In the era when the Empire State Building & Rockefeller Center were built, developers factored in one dead worker for every twelve floors.” This is a horrendous fact, and further points at the fact that working conditions in the 1930s were extremely dangerous. Hence, the safety harness and OSHA logo in my remix.