 everything from the Baroque to renaissance to mannerism to the Edward Hopper's. I didn't see it at first because I was looking for something completely different in these images. But as people started telling me this, I started seeing it. So I went to the Met and I looked around and not being a student of art history. I don't have the academic knowledge, but I was looking for something different. I was looking for how does the light rake across the canvas and is that my light? So when I started this new series, I used that knowledge of not only critical analysis of my own work by others, but I used my trips to the Met. And one thing I did see immediately with this new work with the workers was that I had to use an oval. And it was a very tough decision to make because it's an extraordinary statement, an oval. It has a lot of connotations. Part of the motivation behind this particular series was I wanted to illustrate and show us the people that build the palaces for the neighbors. So I started looking in neighboring buildings and buildings up and down the street and out of the neighborhood and looking through glass and seeing workers. It came to me that it was a noble profession. How is nobility shown in many, many paintings and through history is through the oval. So I turned the tables in a way that the neighbors who were wealthy inhabitants of New York City were relegated to a very harsh geometric container and the workers were awarded the oval. When I started the neighbors series, I had a large lens and was looking through to the neighbors windows. It wasn't successful. And I kept analyzing why could this not be successful. It's a beautiful vignette. It is beautifully lit. And I realized that there was no indication that I was shooting through a window. And one sunny day the light was raking across the windows and it hit every particle of dust and dirt on the glass thereby diffusing the scene behind it into an almost a painterly scene. If I focused on the dirt that this would be the secret that I was looking for. This would be a way of also flattening the planes. I didn't want dimension. I wanted it to appear as all this action was and maybe projected on a fourth of an inch plane of some sort. So the long lens helped with that because that kind of foreshortens and then focusing on the glass further reduced the depth of the action so that it all again appeared as though it was happening as though it was imbued in the glass. It was to me like photographing staying glass. It was almost that, I shudder to say religious experience, but it was an experience that gave everybody and especially the workers all my subjects again nobility a grandeur because it suddenly became bigger than a photo.