Friday 14 August, 2026

Skydriver I love this picture and often wondered if it was a fake. So I asked Claude to do some research. Here’s what it found: The photo is genuine, not a spoof or composite. It’s real — a real girder, real height, real people — but it was staged as a publicity stunt, not a candid snapshot. It comes from a series of “sky-high pose” photos shot by Underwood & Underwood around 1932 during construction of the RKO Building (part of the Rockefeller Center complex) in Manhattan. The same photo agency and era produced the more famous “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” image, which Corbis’s own chief historian confirmed was arranged by Rockefeller Center’s PR team as a promotional stunt using real ironworkers, with several photographers on hand that day. The golfer photo fits the same mold: it’s often captioned “Playing golf in mid-air: Stunts” — Getty’s own catalog labels it a stunt shot, and it’s sometimes attributed to photographer Charles C. Ebbets, though attribution across this whole series is…