Digging in with the Sandhogs

Every photographer has one—that big public photo project you’ve always wanted to do but never figured out how to do it. Whether it’s as perilous as documenting workers building a suspension bridge or as personally complex as trying to capture the plight of teenage runaways on the streets of Los Angeles, the long-term photo project can be as bewilderingly difficult to pull off as it is simple, in theory, to come up with.

If you’re intimidated by the big photographic idea, one that seems like it could take a long time just to get going, not to mention, bring to fruition, New York-based photographer Gina LeVay has two words for you: “Start it!” She advises, “Don’t be afraid to think big, and, no matter how big it seems, the most important thing is to get it started.” LeVay knows what she’s talking about. Through persistence and perseverance, she turned a germ of an idea to photograph miners below New York City’s streets into a successful public exhibition in Grand Central Terminal and a forthcoming book from PowerHouse Publishing.

Enter Sandhogs
It all began in 2003 when LeVay was a student at the School of Visual Arts in New York City struggling to come up with an idea for her master’s thesis project. It wasn’t long after the great Northeast blackout of 2003 and LeVay was obsessed with infrastructure and the feeling that everything around her was crumbling.

At first she toyed with the idea of doing a series of portraits of Con Edison electrical workers and even went so far as to speak with Con Edison’s public relations department to set something up. The plan had been to photograph the workers on the job as their “everyday selves,” and then to capture their “other selves” when they weren’t on duty. For a variety of reasons though, the idea fell through and LeVay decided to rethink the concept.

She had been living in New York City for about nine years at the time, and like most folks, was aware that the city’s water supply comes from upstate New York. What she wasn’t aware of, also like most folks, was that miners had been risking their lives hundreds of feet below the city’s streets to build a new tunnel to bring that water to the city more efficiently. When a friend of hers at the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) told her about these workers, and she learned they were called “sandhogs,” she knew what she wanted to do for her project—photograph these miners in the tunnel below. The problem was, how?

In a post-9/11 world, LeVay knew it wouldn’t be easy to get access to one of the city’s most vital lifelines—its water supply—not to mention to get clearance to take all her gear down into the very heart of New York. But rather than be psyched out by potential obstacles, LeVay decided to get to work. She began with the old fashioned approach of writing a letter to the DEP to give them her background and to outline her intentions.

“In some ways, I thought I had certain advantages since I was from a school and was not planning on doing some kind of an exposé for a tabloid newspaper. I just wanted to take pictures for my thesis project.”
Though this innocent artistic tack may have helped get her in the door, that door promptly slammed shut. The first PR person LeVay spoke with from the DEP gave her the “thanks but no thanks” brush-off. “I couldn’t get past the first level of PR —the gatekeeper. No matter how many times I explained what I wanted to do I kept getting the same response: ‘You’re not allowed to go down there.’ ”

A New Approach
But LeVay is not one to take no for an answer. In fact, she even describes herself as a little pushy when it comes to dealing with difficult people. Instead of trying to crash through the DEP’s gatekeepers though, she decided to go around the gate completely and reach out to the
sandhogs directly.

“I knew there were other ways to approach this,” she says. “And I knew not to give up just because of one roadblock.” What she didn’t expect was how supportive the sandhogs would be when she actually got a chance to explain her project to them in person. She first met the miners after communicating with their union and getting invited to “The Hog House,” a meeting shack that sat atop the giant hole on the West Side of Manhattan that led to City Water Tunnel #3.

Her approach to photographing them was deliberately low-key and non-intrusive. In fact, at first, she didn’t use her camera at all. “I didn’t come there saying ‘I’m a photographer and I’m going to take your picture.’ I developed a rapport with the sandhogs first. I think I brought my camera the first time I was there but I didn’t take it out. I wanted to get to know them first and figure out who’s who. Fortunately, we hit it
off immediately.”

When the DEP’s gatekeeper got wind that LeVay had circumnavigated the agency and gone directly to the sandhogs, she was furious and threatened to take legal action. Since a private contractor, who was hired by the city, employed the sandhogs they couldn’t help LeVay. She had to once again figure out how to jumpstart the project.

As it turned out, the head of her school knew someone in the mayor’s office who was able to speak directly to the Commissioner of the DEP about LeVay’s project. “I knew I wasn’t talking to the right people at the DEP,” she recalls. “Sometimes you have to go straight to the top.” When you hit a snag for your project, don’t be afraid to use every contact in your book,” LeVay advises.

The bold move worked. The DEP Commissioner loved her idea and the project was back on track. “I didn’t accept the fact that I wasn’t going to do the project. I didn’t accept that what I was doing was wrong. I thought it would be beneficial and the DEP Commissioner believed in me and in what I wanted to do,” LeVay says.

LeVay thinks the business-minded approach she took while making her pitch to the commissioner is partially why he was so receptive to it. “You have to be able to get away from your artsy, creative self and present yourself in a business-like manner. This definitely helps you communicate with someone who might not necessarily be in the
creative field.”

Down in the Hole
LeVay’s approach to getting the sandhogs to feel comfortable in front of the camera was similarly practical-minded. She first offered to redo the union logo and then took portraits of the miners in the studio with a Mamiya medium-format camera with a Leaf digital back. The sandhogs loved the results and warmed to the idea of having LeVay take more pictures of them.

“As much as I explained it to them, they could never fully understand why I was out there in the cold trying to photograph them. It wasn’t until I showed them the logo that they were like, ‘Why are we wasting time above ground? Let’s go down in the tunnel.’”

That was, of course, music to LeVay’s ears and in January 2004 she was finally allowed to descend into the giant shaft that led to the 12-foot tunnel. “I was freaking out,” she recalls about her first ride down in the dark elevator cage that took her beneath the city. Because she didn’t know whether this would be her only trip down into the tunnel, LeVay brought everything with her including her trusty Mamiya RZ67 camera loaded with 800 speed Fuji 120 film. “I was like a donkey. I didn’t know when I would get a chance again so I just started shooting. I wasn’t even thinking about where I was half the time.”

As it turned out, the January 2004 elevator ride would be the first of dozens of trips underground for her. Over the span of four years she’s captured thousands of images of the sandhogs at work in the tunnel, most of the time just using the mine’s floodlights to illuminate the scene. Oftentimes she’d rate her ISO 800 film at 3200 in hopes of getting “just something.”

Consequently, LeVay’s color images in the water tunnel have a classic, gritty quality to them that faithfully matches the tough, wet and very dangerous work environment of the sandhogs. “I really feel the film I used was amazing,” she says, noting that even though she’s turned to digital (Canon EOS 5D) for some of her recent work, she prefers the look of film. “I use the 5D with an 85mm f/1.2 Canon lens and I’m happy with that but I still like the look of film better.” Though she is quick to note that digital photography with the Mamiya and Leaf back was essential to helping create life-size portraits of the miners, she still loves “the latitude and the grittiness you get with the [film] grain—you can’t touch that with a digital camera.”

Above Ground
LeVay’s photographs of the miners had their first major above-ground showing in the Vanderbilt Hall of Grand Central Terminal in 2006. The show lasted a week and along with displaying 10 x 12-foot Fujitrans of her photos of the sandhogs, the exhibition featured a scale-accurate video projection of the 12-foot diameter water tunnel shot in real-time to show what it was like to ride a mining train.

Now that the water tunnel has been completed, LeVay has turned her attention to other projects including a series of images of female bullfighters in Spain, and her commercial work for Vogue India, Rolling Stone India, Time magazine and other publications.

Meanwhile, she can’t wait to get back to doing another large-scale public photography project. “Public art is one of the strongest forces for art because it shows that it doesn’t need to be so exclusive,” LeVay says. “And when you’re trying to put something like this together, always follow your gut and be flexible because you never know what roadblocks will come up.”
To see more of LeVay’s work, visit www.ginalevay.com. To get more details on the Sandhogs and LeVay’s forthcoming book on the project go to www.sandhogproject.com.

Dan Havlik is the former editor at three imaging-related magazines and a longtime journalist and photographer. He currently runs a freelance writing and imaging company called Havlik Industries. He can be reached at [email protected].