Virtual Memories Show 664:
Glenn Kurtz

“It’s a profound question: What are we looking at? If you keep asking that question in a naive and cunning way, it will draw out the history of the world.”
Who were the men who built the Empire State Building? Glenn Kurtz returns to the show to tell their story with MEN AT WORK: The Empire State Building and the Untold Story of the Craftsmen who Built It (Seven Stories Press). We talk about how he accidentally fell into this project, how “turn every page” led him to a key discovery about Lewis Hine‘s photos of the Empire State construction, how his experience researching and writing THREE MINUTES IN POLAND helped him with this book, his childhood connection with the Empire State, and how identifying their subjects affects the mythic aura of Hine’s photographs. We get into the corporate perspective of the building and how it dehumanizes the workers who built it, and similarly how that heroic collectivist notion of The Worker devalues workers as people, whether craftsmanship and artisanship survived the transition into mass production during the skyscraper era, Hine’s authorial fallacy and the genius of his portraits, and what the Empire State says about the immigration-dynamics of the workforce and the role of unions, We also discuss the question of context and how the question, “What are we looking at?” can reveal the world, the resonance of Hine’s Icarus/Sky Boy pic, the messiness of history, the joy of Virginia Woolf’s diaries, why Glenn just wants to write a novel without it inspiring a nonfiction project, and more. Give it a listen! And go read MEN AT WORK!
“We have this idea that we want to be remembered, but one of the first things that goes away in family histories is the specificity of personalities.”

“I was surprised by how completely the idea of Worker overtakes the actual person.”

“Hine didn’t have a language precise enough to define what he was trying to do.”

“The closer you look at some of these sources, the fuzzier things get.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
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About our Guest

Glenn Kurtz is the author of Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film, which was named a “Best Book of 2014” by the New Yorker, the Boston Globe, and National Public Radio. A documentary film, Three Minutes—A Lengthening, based on the book, was directed by Bianca Stigter, co-produced by Academy Award-winner Steve McQueen, and narrated by Helena Bonham Carter. After premiering at the Venice Film Festival in 2021, the film was an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival and received the inaugural Yad Vashem Award for Outstanding Holocaust Documentary. Glenn’s first book, Practicing: A Musician’s Return to Music, garnered enthusiastic reviews from the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. The recipient of a 2016-2017 John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Glenn is a graduate of Tufts University and the New England Conservatory of Music and holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University. His new book is MEN AT WORK: The Empire State Building and the Untold Story of the Craftsmen who Built It.
Follow Glenn on Instagram and Facebook, and listen to our 2022 conversation.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Virtual Memories HQ on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 microphones feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4 digital recorder & interface. I recorded the intro and outro on a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Glenn by Beowulf Sheehan; photo Icarus by Lewis Hine; photo of me & Glenn by me. It’s on my instagram.

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