Windows on a World is an audio slideshow of Sam Paino, a street-level window washer working in Queens, New York, that I started while a grad student at the International Center of Photography in 2006. I finished my last interview with Sam when I returned from Africa in November. You can view it now on my website.
Large sheets of glass trace the line of a skyscraper ever upwards, offering a heroic backdrop to the work of a big-city window washer.
Sam Paino remembers working that line, but has spent most of his past thirty years closer to the ground than to the sky. After serving in Korea he sold shoes before buying the window washing route he still works today. He’s earned enough to buy a pleasant home on Staten Island and to put his two daughters through college and graduate school.
The sole employee of Fieldstone Cleaning, Sam works an often invisible trade along the streets of Queens. Throughout his mornings, he stops for “coffee or bullshit” with long-time customers who have become his closest friends.
Cancer took twelve long years to drain the life out of his wife, Yolanda, who passed away in the middle of the year I photographed him. In her absence, Sam leaves home before 4AM to get on with life rather than linger in the silence left behind.
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New York is incredible. Thanks to visit my blog. My grandpa is still dying, I write you and show more pictures later.
ReplyDeleteI visit your website and well, I come back to your blog to tell you that your photographs are very beautiful, you capture the light in his best splendor...this pictures reminds me my time in New York, taking photographs wherever...I will send you some photographs, I have a serie of 911 conmemoration between others.
I like too your story about Family Scrapbook. I'm too much intersted in human behavior and human relationships, families, etc... Sometimes I think that the photojournalism a lot of times just looks at the most impact lands or problems, and forget the life near their neighborhoods.
We keep in contact. I want to put your link in my blog.
please to meet you.