In celebration of the final stages of the Big Dig and the people who work extraordinarily hard each day to make it a possibility, photographer Michael Hintlian shows his work, *Digging: The Workers of Boston's Big Dig*, and discusses the difficulties and joys of putting this collection together. Starting in 1997, Michael Hintlian began photographing the 5,000 men and women who worked on the Big Dig. Despite being thrown off of one site after another, his perseverance paid off in a book of stunning, gritty black-and-white photographs.
Michael Hintlian is a full time documentary photographer based in Boston. His work has appeared in major US dailies and periodicals internationally. Self taught as a photographer, he studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University. In 1996 he was distinguished as a Traveling Scholar from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and was a visiting artist at the Museum School for the following academic year. His work has been widely exhibited and is in the collections of museums and galleries worldwide. Currently he is working on long term documentaries in former Soviet Republic of Armenia and Nagorno-Karabagh and in Africa. His documentary project on the Central Artery/Tunnel Project in Boston (the Big Dig) was published by Commonwealth Editions in 2004. He currently directs the Documentary Photography department at the New England School of Photography and is a Graduate Mentor at the Art Institute of Boston.