Chicago’s window-washer photographer | The Scene

Man on a ledge Michael Kelly gets high for a living. He documents it for free. As a window-washer supervisor with Corporate Cleaning Services, the 32-year-old has an all-access pass to top-down, vertigo-inducing views on a daily basis. Lucky for us, he brings his camera, fitted with a wide-angle lens to capture the full breadth of the Chicago skyline. “Washing 500 windows every day, I started feeling like I was just a janitor,” the former college rock climber says. “I wanted something else to do, to be excited about.” For the last three years, the Rolling Meadows native has been posting his shots on Flickr under the name Sky Ninja. (Kelly’s Hispanic coworkers, including Marco Ortiz in the above photo, call him Chango Blanco, “White Monkey.”) His stream is a mix of sweeping panoramics and detail shots, such as gargoyles taken at angles that only a window washer could get. “I see people taking pictures of buildings from the street,” he says with a laugh. “It makes a world of difference when you’re 400 feet in the air.”