Keep in mind that 95% of viral "Unknown picture of a famous moment you've never seen before" posts on the internet are not actually they thing they claim they are. This is definitely not a picture of Charles Ebbets taking the "Lunch atop a skyscaper" photo.
That doesn't mean they aren't cool pictures or interesting in their own right, but don't believe any title you see on a reddit post.
Edit: And this is not to pick on reddit in particular. Even historians make these mistakes. Here's a time I found a respected historian making published (but incorrect) claim of the date people started using Christmas cards because the highly respected newspaper archive he was using for research had mis-dated the scanned pages of a newspaper under '1800s' instead of '1900s': https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/k6inyt/ive_a...
You say “definitely not” so surely. It may not be, but if you’re going to disprove a claim you should probably provide something to back it up, especially if the claim itself has no proof. It’s easy to read your comment and believe you, but it’s just as easy to read the post and believe it.
I think it's pretty unusual to have photos of photographers at this point in time. Noone was interested in knowing how photos were taken, the subject wasn't the photographer. Photographer as personality happened in the 60s.
Saying that, the photo in question does look rather fine. The equipment looks right, i'd say that it's a Speed Graphic, and it looks to be the right sort of model, looks like it's got a rangefinder although he's using the wire sights for framing. Holding the front bed with the left hand for stability looks to be about right, so this i'd suggest is definitely a photographer, not a model/actor playing a photographer if you see what I mean.
Some of these photos use the same camera trick that Harold Lloyd used in Safety Last!. The camera angle makes it look like it would be a direct fall to street level, when in fact there is a solid floor below, just out of the camera's view:
The guy at the end is drinking. I though it was just water. Times have changed. My dad worked on Bart during the 70. He said, drinking was commonplace, at least amomg electricians.
The first man from the right has been identified as Slovak worker Gustáv (Gusti) Popovič from the village of Vyšný Slavkov in the Levoča District of Slovakia. Popovič was originally a lumberjack and carpenter. In 1932 he sent his wife Mária (Mariška) a postcard with this photograph on which he wrote, "Don't you worry, my dear Mariška, as you can see I'm still with bottle. Your Gusti."
Hum. This is a nice shot, but I guess the affirmation is wrong. Lets think a little about geometry... I am not a new yorker, but by simply looking at google maps, at the lunch photo, they have the Central Park at their back, and the photographer has the Empire State behind him, so I guess he should be photographing the Hudson River or just posing for the photo.
I'm quite certain that the picture is not what it claims to be. But I'm glad the Reddit thread got me to check it out.