To create Men in the Cities, Robert Longo's best-known series, the artist set up a camera on the rooftop of his Manhattan apartment building and invited his friends to be photographed. He proceeded to tie them up with ropes and hurl objects directly at them, aiming to capture their reactive movements in the resulting images. Their instinctive attempts to protects themselves and evade flying objects caused them to form dramatically contorted positions, evoking a range of imagery from interpretive dance or children playing to saints writhing with anguish. Longo subsequently projected these images onto paper, meticulously recreating the figures against a pristine white backdrop in his signature hyper-realistic, monochromatic style. With the New York rooftops and cloudy blue sky removed from the background, the figures are entirely decontextualised. Their striking positions seem to undermine the conventional associations of their professional attire, offering a light-hearted commentary on the superficiality of such clothing.