'Digging' For The Big Dig

After 3,000 rolls of film, 110,000 photographs and seven years of work, photojournalist and Tufts graduate Michael Hintlian recently published a book chronicling Boston’s Big Dig.

Medford/Somerville, Mass. [12.22.04] After 20 rejections and a flirtation with self-publishing, Tufts graduate Michael Hintlian finally found the right fit for Digging, his 128-page book of photography that documents the immensity of the Central Artery/Tunnel project and the matching immensity of Hintlian’s endeavour itself.

"The Artery project is probably the most hostile environment in which I have ever worked; mud, clouds of dust, splashing concrete, an oily mist in the air, subzero temperatures in winter and summer heat," Hintlian told Focus magazine.

Hintlian was not deterred by these conditions, though the attitudes of workers initially did not make the project any easier. But he persevered and won over many of his critics at the job site.

"For the first two years I was usually chased out of the sites and told to leave," Hintlian told Focus. "To my advantage, the project was so big that I could walk a block or two and enter another totally separate and unconnected site and continue to work. I got used to it. Then, after several years, supervision got used to me and grew tired of shooing me out.

Endearing himself to his photography subjects helped Hintlian gain access.

“I made sure I brought 5X7's to pass out on some regular basis, which helped break ice, and after a while I was able to work almost unnoticed,” he described to Focus. “That was what I worked for and it's made a big difference in the kind of photographs I have been able to make."

After his results were accepted by the workers at the job site they were soon accepted by various publications including Stuff Magazine, Architecture Design and Icon Magazine. In December 2003, the Tufts graduate received the Griffin Award for his Big Dig image "Leaping Shadow."

Digging is the latest product of Hintlian’s Big Dig photography. Civil engineer Fred Salvucci, the man who convinced former Mass. Governor Michael Dukakis that the Big Dig would work, wrote the introduction to the book, which was published by Commonwealth Editions.

“He got it and understood it. He became a huge ally,” Hintlian told the North Shore Sunday of Lynnfield, noting that Salvucci is the son of a union bricklayer and grew up in a family of laborers.

“Michael Hintlian’s stunning photography reminds us that, at its core, the project has been about construction workers using their muscle and brains to create an engineering marvel,” Salvucci wrote in the introduction. “Hintlian has captured in photographs both the acrobatic poetry in motion of Big Dig workers and the sheer bone-chilling ache involved in the work . . . (He) has given us a unique opportunity to sense how this project looked to the workers who built it – underground, in the mud, or a hundred feet in the air on the Zakim Bridge.”

Many of the photographs were shot on black and white film, mirroring Hintlian’s perception of the public works project.

"Why black and white? The Big Dig is a black and white project; there is very little color,” Hintlian told Focus. “When I shoot color I really want to go for color, I think that's what a photographer is compelled to do . . . the palette becomes available and, thus, becomes an important consideration."

Besides his Big Dig work, Hintlian is involved with a project about the former Soviet republics of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabagh, which was once part of Azerbaijan.

“The more I do it, I look for a photo that echoes something within me,” Hintlian told the North Shore Sunday. “Great photography isn’t available through thinking. If a photo shoot isn’t working, there’s too much editing going on.”