Brian Finke photographs people who tend to be described in categories rather than names: flight attendants, cheerleaders, football players. His third monograph, Construction, applies that habit of attention to the men and women working on building sites in New York City and across the surrounding region.

Finke works by immersion. He joins a crew, stays long enough to be ignored, and waits for self-consciousness to fall away. What he photographs then is small and specific — a stance, a raised eyebrow, the way a hand rests on a tool — and those details accumulate into a portrait of a group that resists the flat images outsiders carry around. Under hard hats and high-visibility vests, the uniformity is real; so is the individuality inside it.

Compared with his earlier series, these pictures give more room to the surroundings. Workers appear alongside the machines they operate, and both are measured against the structures rising behind them. Finke has described the result as blending the heroic with the mundane, and the scale he sets up — small figures, enormous frames of steel and concrete — does exactly that without editorializing.

The book was published by Decode Books in 2012 as a first edition hardcover of 80 pages, with accompanying text by Whitney Johnson. The sequence is compact and built to be handled rather than displayed under glass.

For a collector, the case for Construction rests on position rather than scarcity: it is the third in a sustained line of group portraits, and the one in which Finke opens his frame to take in architecture and labor at once. It documents a particular stretch of building in and around New York, and, more durably, a method of looking at people who are usually looked past.