2004 | DVCAM | 8:15

A series of floor traders are seen just outside the epicenter of world financial power, the New York Stock Exchange. Behind the veil of abstraction provided by the flow of data and the systematic, insatiable hunger for greater and greater profits, the men and women who actually execute the orders to buy and sell have emerged into the cold winter air for a cigarette break. Each sequence takes up a healthy portion of the actual time involved in smoking a cigarette, alternately revealing worried looks and perhaps the petty concerns of banal interior thought. As the masks drop, the traders are closely examined as individuals. Bored and isolated, the tension, greed and pressure briefly held at bay, they are seen as all-too-human.