From Egypt’s ancient Pyramids to NYC’s World Trade Towers, the most spectacular monuments on earth are intended to convey the height of accomplishment. In expressing these visions, it is the architects who shape our societal ideals and expectations. But no matter how grand the project, it is built from the ground up by teams of individuals working in concert. To celebrate this historical partnership of planning and execution, Kwesi Budu-Arthur of the Cambridge Seven Associates architectural firm, asked Michael Hintlian to show his Big Dig photographs for their inaugural exhibit at the Paul Dietrich Gallery in their newly renovated offices. Good move.
Legendary as it was in scale and duration, the Central Artery/Tunnel Project that tied Boston in knots from 1991 through 2005, remained a mystery in our midst, cordoned off from those who were detoured around it daily. Not so, for documentary photographer Michael Hintlian. In 1997, he bought himself the wrong color hard hat and vest and snuck inside to record the proceedings. For seven and a half years, several times a week, in sweltering heat and numbing cold, at literally all hours of the day and night, Hintlian worked alongside construction crews to portray their labors. To say that this distinguished him from sanctioned project photographers is something of an understatement.
Rather than producing formulaic, sweeping color panoramas of each large-scale construction site, Hintlian created intimate, gritty images of the laborers in action. He spent the better part of a year gaining their trust, returning to the site with gifts of photographs for the crewmen, until they understood that it was really them, not the steel and concrete structures, that Hintlian was extolling in his images. Once they accepted him, they protected his deferential attention with the right color hard hat and timely warnings when project supervisors approached. Such unprecedented access allowed Hintlian to forgo mundane shots of the colossal construction and instead capture the hidden human side of The Big Dig.
Hintlian’s images crackle with activity and pulse with human drama. Although his focus is clearly on the action, Hintlian builds his images on strong composition – aided in part by actual gridded structures – and rich, full B&W tonal range punctuated by points and counterpoints of light. His sophisticated treatment of asymmetry and motion, his dynamic juxtapositions of near and far objects within the frame and his playfully symbolic placement of human shadows, produce awe-inspiring imagery. Hintlian gets the physical, emotional immediacy of men at work, transporting us inside the Big Dig in a way no one else has.
In the tradition of street photographers like the iconic Henri Cartier-Bresson, Hintlian shot B&W film on a 35mm Leica camera (with a necessary flash, underground), presenting his photographs without any cropping. This photographic discipline somehow seems appropriately respectful of the physical toughness displayed by his subjects in the trenches. Hintlian succeeds in glorifying the laborers without romanticizing their work. It is both a photographic triumph and an amazing tribute to the men who built “the largest, most complex, and technologically challenging highway project in the history of the United States”.
This show is free and open to the public through September 11, 2015. For more information, go to: http://www.c7a.com/about
Feature Image: “Digging at dusk, Atlantic Avenue, 1998” by Michael Hintlian (courtesy of the artist)