One of my favorite pictures of New York City is Paul Strand’s “Wall Street, 1915:”

( http://www.masters-of-photography.com/S/strand/strand_wall_street_full.html )

In his Wall Street image, Strand juxtaposes abstracted figures of commuting workers plodding past the House of Morgan on Wall Street. They plod past the bank as robots; dwarfed in scale, and dehumanized by the very institutions they serve. In my own image, I echo the point Strand makes here about New York City. In Strand’s day, laborers were little more than subservient chattel. In our day, workers and institutions alike are decimated by financial greed. In my image, the commuting workers are larger than Strands, but similarly abstracted by the light. Instead of a bank, they plod past a sleek store window filled with robotic mannequins wearing clothes that few of them can afford. They plod along the sidewalk, some with heads bowed, just as the workers back in 1915 plodded below the black windows of the Morgan Bank. New York City is a city of great vitality. But it is also a city built on the backs of its workers, and as the 21st century dawns, those workers are feeling the pressure.