oook blog

State Street Bank, 1964-1965

In 1964-1965 (Junior and Senior year of college) I was employed as a Progress Photographer on the State Street Bank Building, one of the first BIG buildings in Boston's Financial District. This allowed me carte blanche to wander around the building site, usually one or two days a week, and take pictures of anything I thought might be of interest to the general contractor (Gilbane Inc., still very much in business). They paid me for prints of pictures they found useful, usually scenes recording construction progress. I used the opportunity to take hundreds of pictures that I knew they wouldn't be interested in --construction details, men at work, stuff that appealed to my developing aesthetic and compositional sense.

The 100-odd rolls of negatives lived in a box on a shelf, and I always figured I'd get around to doing something with them someday. That someday arrived last December, and in a month-long blitz I scanned more than 2200 images, and was overwhelmed with the riches and possibilities. It's taken a couple of months to get to the next stage, organizing and putting up a bunch of sets of images at Flickr, but now there's a Collection of five sets, about 250 images in all. It may be most effective to watch the Men at Work set as a Slideshow.