Enter the 2013 Photo Contest!

July 23, 2013

Enter your workplace's version of 'Lunch Atop a Skyscraper" (but don't forget your safety equipment!)

In the midst of the Great Depression, a still photographer shot a picture of 11 ironworkers eating lunch on a steel girder 840 feet above the streets of New York City. The photo, entitled “Lunch Atop a Skyscraper,” was staged. But the workers who demonstrated the lengths and heights people will go to for a job, were real. And their lack of safety equipment symbolized the sacrifices workers made just to find any job and feed their families.

Lunch Atop a Skycraper is one of the most celebrated photos of all time. But dramatic—if less famous—photographs of men and women at work are often buried in family photo albums or posted among millions of fleeting images on Facebook. Great photography deserves better.

That’s why the IBEW sponsors ayearly photography contest.It’s a chance for members to connect their powerful skills with a camera to the often unsung and under-appreciated work that they do every day.

For more than 15 years of competition, the IBEW Journal and The Electrical Worker have been honored to print hundreds of photos of and by IBEW members at work—restoring the power after storms, helping build their era’s architectural masterpieces—driving the development of new energy sources—and performing hundreds of other jobs that contribute so much to communities across North America and even beyond.

We invite all IBEW members toenter the 2013 IBEW Photography Contest. It’s your chance to not only match your skills with brothers and sisters across our union’s landscape, but to help chronicle—for posterity—the shining achievements of a union that is prepared and equipped for its future.

Photo used under a Creative Commons license fromFlickr user daily sunny.