More World Window Cleaning Pictures

Workers clean the windows of a newly built office building in Taiyuan, Shanxi province. Click to enlarge.

A window cleaner washes the window of the athletes' hotel in Istanbul. Click to enlarge.

Sailors clean windows for the watchstanders inside the Flag Bridge of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) looking for surface and air contacts during a transit through the Strait of Hormuz. Click to enlarge.

Employees clean the windows of the main building of the European Parliament in Strasbourg. Click to enlarge.

Window cleaners stand on a platform hanging from the front of the CCTV (China Central Television) building on a sunny day in central Beijing. Click to enlarge.

A worker cleans the windows of a hotel building in downtown Sofia. Click to enlarge.

A cleaner washes the glass windows of a building in Brasilia. Click to enlarge.

A worker cleans the windows of an apartment block on a haze day in central Beijing. Click to enlarge.

Cleaners watch an Air China plane land as they sit atop the roof of the Beijing Capital International Airport's train station. Click to enlarge.

A worker cleans the windows of an office building in Tokyo. Click to enlarge.

Workers clean windows at a building in downtown Buenos Aires. Click to enlarge.

A worker cleans the windows of a hotel in central Mexico City. Click to enlarge.

People watch as a window cleaner works outside the 14th floor at the Shard in London. Click to enlarge.

Workers clean the windows of a building in Quito. Click to enlarge.

Kevin was forced to sell his original window-cleaning company at a loss in 2003 to devote himself to Huntley and Carr’s forthcoming trial and the subsequent Bichard Inquiry into Britain’s child-protection procedures. The parents of Holly Wells speak out a decade after she was murdered. The family survived on Nicola’s salary as a legal secretary, by re-mortgaging their house and by accepting a £6,000 charity hand-out to pay their bills. For a man with a work ethic as powerful as Kevin’s it was a  difficult time. Says Kevin: ‘I got going again, I bought some rounds off other window cleaners, I did a lot of door-knocking and leafleting, but we went from being comfortable to being financially stretched for a while. You don’t think about it for days, weeks, months, but then there comes a time when you realise you have to put food on the table.

The cost of repairing broken window blinds at London’s iconic City Hall, which houses the offices of Mayor Boris Johnson, is set to top £730,000. The glass-clad building on the South Bank of the Thames – which was designed by architect  Norman Foster and is one of the capital’s landmarks – has suffered from defective blinds for years, hampering efforts to clean its windows. The bulk of the costs of the repairs are being met under an insurance policy. But the Greater London Authority (GLA) must contribute almost £100,000 in taxpayers’ money – under an excess clause in the policy and for work that it does not cover.

Window washers from Citywide Building Services, Inc. clean the glass on the Omni Dallas Hotel on July 16, 2012. Click to enlarge.

A window that generates electricity simply through its very existence has long been the dream of many working on photovoltaic research. Now, thanks to researchers at University of California, Los Angeles, we are one step closer. Using a new polymer solar cell prototype, they’ve been able to craft a cell that converts infrared light into electrical energy with a conversion efficiency of four percent at 66 percent transparency. In other words, you can see through it and it still generates current. Imagine for a moment if Google Glass or some device developed from it utilized this kind of technology? You’d have a self-charging heads-up display.

Divergent Dances for Windows and Walls: Aerial artistry. As they checked out the Bata’s two-tiered roof, Prendergast, an engineer, noticed a diagram on the back of a locked hatch that confirmed the existence of several secure window-washer points, thus saving the cost of installing a special gantry. Divergent Dances for Windows and Walls is presented July 24-28 July at the Bata Shoe Museum, 327 Bloor St. W.. Toronto.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin talks on the phone as he wears Google's new Internet-connected glasses in San Francisco, Google is making prototypes of the device, known as Project Glass, available to test.

A window washer repels a downtown building while cleaning the windows, in Atlanta. Click to enlarge.

Guy from Fish Window Cleaning Co. using a 30-foot pole to wash windows on the Fifth Ave. firehouse. Ann Arbor.

A worker cleans the window of an office building in Taiyuan, Shanxi province. Click to enlarge.

As Treasury minister David Gauke delighted crowds on Newsnight with his sermon on the “morals” of paying cash-in-hand, I just paid Perry, my window cleaner, £4 this morning without so much as a request to see his receipts for chamois leather.

Urban-friendly Target to open Wednesday in downtown Seattle. Window washer Scott Lund gets the windows ready for the opening of CityTarget. Unlike regular Targets, it uses window mannequins to showcase apparel and will play background music.

A man cleaning a window at an entrance of the headquarters of Japan's top advertising agency Dentsu. The company announced on July 12 a plan to buy British-based media group Aegis for 3.16 billion pounds (4.89 billion), in Tokyo. A high yen, long seen as debilitating Japan's exporters, has pushed Japan Inc to buy up foreign firms and mines at a record pace as businesses look to overseas markets for growth potential.

Flying, by Sachigusa Yasuda: Afraid of heights? Then don't spend too long on this page. This is not a gentle bird's-eye panorama of Manhattan, or even the much-imitated "tourist up the Empire State Building" snapshot. This is New York as you won't have seen it before: a dizzying vista that makes you feel less like you're flying and more like you're about to plummet to the ground. It's the viewpoint of Spider-Man, a fearless window cleaner or, more unsettlingly, someone contemplating suicide.

Sachigusa Yasuda – Tokyo-born but now based in New York – has stitched together hundreds of images taken from the tops of skyscrapers. In the name of art, she hung out of top-floor windows and climbed on to roofs in cities across the world, from Singapore and Seoul to Hamburg.

The result is a montage of multiple viewpoints – exaggerated, unreal urban perspectives anchored from a single point – that would be impossible to take in with any single camera, let alone the naked eye. Her distorted skylines combine a vertiginous drop down to the ground, which hits you smack between the eyes, with a sweeping panorama of miles of surrounding land, so vast that it takes in even the Earth's curvature. It's this that gives her work its uneasy, nausea-inducing quality: you feel as if you might either tumble to the ground or soar off to the horizon.

The photographs may be disorienting, but they are also peaceful. The lofty perspective suggests the quiet that comes with being so high up, above the wail of sirens. This intense urbanness will make you either book a flight to New York, or run for the hills.