After the Statue of Liberty, Paul Manship’s gilded eight-ton 1934 sculpture of Prometheus is probably the most famous statue in New York City. Prometheus is said to have stolen fire from the god Zeus and given it to mankind. The model for Prometheus was a man named Leonardo Nole, a postal worker from New Rochelle, New York. He was a fitness buff, and had a taut fit body that Manship saw as perfect representation of a Greek god. His modeling fee (during the Great Depression) was $1 an hour. Nole died in 1998 at the age of 95. The statue itself was originally called Leaping Louie by New Yorkers, no doubt because the stock market had crashed, it was located at the base of a tall building, and it appeared to be frozen in mid-plummet. It originally anchored a shopping plaza, but it failed, and was replaced with a skating rink. Thousands of tourists photograph this statue every day, and hundreds skate below its feet, but few realize what it represents, and mentions of Paul Manship, Leonardo Nole, and Leaping Louie would draw a blank stare. I photographed the 75-year- old Prometheus by abstracting it down to the head and arm and a row of eleven jets of water. I did not include its torch because the hair itself seems to be a mass of fire. I underexposed the image to saturate the gilded surface of the sculpture and make it appear to be reaching towards us out of the past.