Digging

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Beneath the city, behind all the hoopla, 5000 men and women did the work that resulted in “The Big Dig.” This is their story, in graphic black-and-white. Boston’s Central Artery/Tunnel Project, The Big Dig, began as a brilliant feat of engineering outlined on the back of an envelope by Frederick Salvucci, Governor Dukakis’s secretary of transportation. Today, all but complete, it has transformed the face of Boston. Often lost in the drama of engineering, politics, and finance that gave birth to the project are the millions of hours of labor that it took to perform what amounted to open-heart surgery on a living, breathing city.Digging is a celebration of the men and women who dug the Dig — not the politicians or businesspeople, but the sandhogs, laborers, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, ironworkers, piledrivers, surveyors, and operating engineers who sweated and bled together underground for over ten years. In 1997 documentary photographer Michael Hintlian had an instinct to begin visiting job sites and recording the work. Time and again, he was thrown off a site, only to move two blocks down the street and start shooting again. Eventually, workers and contractors alike developed a grudging respect for his perseverance and sense of purpose. Seven years in the making, Digging is an eloquent tribute not only to Boston’s working men and women but to laborers everywhere. Hintlian’s images, shot exclusively in black-and-white, are graphic, dramatic, and ultimately inspiring.The foreword is by Frederick Salvucci, the son of a union bricklayer, who fathered the project and remains its most eloquent spokesman. “Michael Hintlian’s photographs bring us places we could never go, to see things we could never see.” — Nubar Alexanian, documentary photographer (Where Music Comes From)”

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