But it's mostly another long time ago that they recall. The images follow in the footsteps of Lewis Hine's photos of sooty young coal breakers in the first decade of the 20th-century and ironworkers constructing New York's Empire State Building in the 1930s, Margaret Bourke-White's photos of factory laborers in the 1930s, W. Eugene Smith's photos of Pittsburgh steelworkers in the 1950s, and Sebastião Salgado's photos of miners and oil workers and tea pickers in the '80s and '90s. Flinty (and often downtrodden) workers are a stable of photojournalism.
"This is the same kind of work still going on," Goldberg says. "This is how you dig tunnels. I was really surprised to see that."
Month after month, the boring machine, guided by GPS, slowly wormed its way forward, four feet at a pop. Each time a tunnel ring of pre-fab concrete was installed behind it. Then the machine hydraulically leveraged itself four feet more ahead.
On December 1, 2005, Goldberg attended a Narragansett Bay Commission press conference near the Foundry complex. Workers had sunk a shaft there, and Goldberg waited aboveground, watching a video feed as the borer, coming from the other end and right on target, cracked through the rock at the bottom.
"You're aboveground, you couldn't feel a thing," he says. "It was kind of surreal. So after the breakthrough, probably a half-hour or an hour after, they took me down and the dust had cleared a little bit." He photographed the motley collection of 18 men on the tunnel crew lined up atop the rubble in front of the boring machine's 30-foot wide flat face, all wheels and blades.
At midnight on October 31, the completed $350 million combined sewer overflow project went into operation. (Additional tunnels are planned to address similar overflow problems in Pawtucket and Central Falls.)
Showing me his portraits of grubby workers in hard hats, boots, coats, and overalls among the cables and lights and puddles of the tunnels, Goldberg says, "These are the sand hogs — some of them travel all over the world just doing tunnels . . . I was just amazed by the people that work down there, in this environment, in the dark, literally, for the 12-hour shifts that they did. The strangeness of the environment, how it looked like a totally foreign landscape, yet it's right underneath where I've lived so much of my life."
You can read Greg Cook's blog at gregcookland.com/journal.
