On May 1, 1931, President Herbert Hoover officially dedicated New York City’s Empire State Building. This reminded me of Karsh’s still life “City of Straws.” Karsh wrote in regard to a trip he made to the Empire State in the 1930s: “My first glimpse of New York was something between a wondrous dream and a terrible nightmare; something unreal.” In Maria Tippett’s biography of Karsh, Portrait in Light and Shadow (Anansi Press, 2007) Tippett notes that Karsh found a way of portraying these mixed feelings when a member of his staff placed a box of straws on the table. Karsh said: “Before I realized it, I was… evolving my own interpretation and just the upper structure of a great and ephemeral metropolis.”