Charles Clyde Ebbets

Charles Clyde Ebbets was an American photographer active in the early twentieth century. Born in 1905, he led an adventurous life as a pilot, hunter, and photojournalist before working as a photographer in New York. He is most often associated with the famous image of construction workers eating lunch on a steel beam high above the city, taken during the building of a Rockefeller Center skyscraper.

That vertigo-inducing picture, showing men perched casually over the streets far below, became one of the most iconic photographs of the era, though the exact authorship has been debated. Ebbets photographed the daring workers who built New York's skyline. His name is linked to one of the most memorable images of American ambition and nerve.