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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