Man on Spire
Date Posted: June 6, 2016
Posted In: Ideas,
Editor’s Note: Ever wonder what it would be like to be at the top of the tallest building in the world? Would you like to go there with no fear of falling off? The NY Times VR app allows you to join the two men on their climb up the One World Trade Center spire and see the view they could see.
From The New York Times: The thing you have to keep reminding yourself when you look at the pictures is that Jamison Walsh is not a thrill-seeker. Growing up, he never cared about climbing trees or the other daredevil stuff kids got into. He worked construction in high school, “anything to make a little money,” and his first job after college was as a special-ed teacher. Now he’s a safety liaison, training people who need to climb heights for their work, helping to keep them secure — a “Joe Schmo who goes to work every day”; that’s what he says about himself. So when he got the call to lead the adventure photographer Jimmy Chin’s climb up the 1 World Trade Center spire for a magazine cover shoot, he didn’t tell anyone about it. He didn’t post about it on Facebook. He simply put it in his calendar. He even did another job in Trenton earlier that day. All these new buildings, which have to be scaled and inspected and worried about? “More work,” he says, and laughs. As we ascend to the 800-foot mark more regularly, as we plant ourselves up there for good, business for Jamison Walsh is booming.
Jimmy Chin wasn’t all that concerned with safety, to be honest; he was more concerned about the unknowns of rigging the first shots. He wanted to convey the “airiness” of being up that high; he wanted to convey the awe he knew that he would feel — the awe that motivates everything he does, whether photographing free climbers in Yosemite for National Geographic or dangling from unclimbed sandstone towers in Chad. He was mostly thinking that shooting straight down the spire “might not give you a sense of the actual spire,” and how can you show how big the world is from up there with just one shot? He wanted the camera to swing out a little, and he was thinking of the best ways to do that. He settled on a long monopod, a six-foot pole, and that’s about all he could think about. He had returned from China a few days before, coming home jet-lagged from another big shoot. The safety issue felt like a nonissue to him. This guy was part of the first ascent of the sharkfin at Meru, in the Himalayas. He skied from the summit of Everest. He’d never climbed a skyscraper, but 1,776 feet in the air is nothing for him; 1,776 is usually what he calls a good start. And anyway, he had his very own safety liaison.