You will not die if a penny thrown off the Empire State Building hits you.  Case in point: Anthony Savini.

About ten years ago, Anthony Savini was walking along, minding his own business, when something hit him. He turned around to yell at his assailant, but no one was there. Suddenly, it started raining pennies. He had become a magnet for money. It took him a second to realize he was right under the Empire State Building. Tourists were throwing coins off the skyscraper, as if Midtown Manhattan was a giant wishing well. Savini picked up the coin and left before another one could sting him.

“This chance encounter with a penny moving at 66 miles an hour was the beginning of my collection of coins that have stories,” says Savini. “The collection grew innocently to hundreds of coins, and collected dust in a binder.” Savini pocketed any coins he found. A 1990 penny from the Woodmere Train Station Café in New York. A 1968 yellow-painted dime, change from In & Out Burger in L.A. A penny found in a “give a penny, take a penny” dish at a deli. A quarter that was painted blue that he got as change from a truck stop in Arizona. A fingerprinted penny he found in his pocket.

After 9/11 Savini began photographing the coins he found as the series Change. For posterity’s sake, he photographed the money in the condition in which it was found. He used actual film, and only used PhotoShop for printing purposes. He explains, “Realism and the power of reality are an important part of the series.”

It is this realism that makes Change so fascinating. We live in an era in which digital retouching and plastic surgery, publicity stunts and spin doctors, and voice modulation and mockumentaries have become the norm. Even money has gotten a makeover, with collectible state quarters and safety-enhanced paper money.

“In recent years, as the dollar’s value changed for the worse, I began to look at the collection differently,” says Savini. “The Euro, China, globalization and other factors are affecting the value of the dollar in ways that ten years ago would have been unimaginable.”

It seems that these days, everything is subject to “change.”  As a backlash, people are searching for something real, something authentic. It’s given craze to unplugged and indie music, books like Found and Milk Eggs Vodka, reality TV (Savini himself has been a director of photography on numerous reality tv shows) and This American Life, and shabby chic and DIY aesthetics. Even if these trends might be bolstered by a larger corporate company and are staged or sliced and manipulated, at least they feel real. What it comes down to is that they feel personal.

And that’s what makes Change successful. The photographs are visually appealing, but aren’t particularly innovative (a quick search on Flickr reveals 54,433 photographs that match a search for “coin”). More so, Savini’s photographs are just that: copies or representations of the real thing, not the binder full of found coins. However, Savini is a wonderful storyteller that brings depth to his art.

He convincingly makes us reconsider the everyday objects in our life. Replete with endearingly genuine typos, he writes:

The photographs in Chnage [sic] are designed to bring the viewer up close to the money they use every day, surprising people who often admit they never really looked at change before. Full of detail and story, each photo on it’s [sic] own stands as an individual work of art, but as a group they take on a different role. Some of the coins feel as if they could be relics from ancient Rome and Greece, confusing something being produced today with something produced over 2000 years ago. Together the images question the value of money, the state of the dollar today, and into the future.

Change: Photographs of found coins are on view at Piola—a decidedly commercial pizza restaurants (located at 48 East 12th Street) in a city full of greasy dives—until June 30.

Savini has plans to turn Change into a book, which may in fact be a more compelling way for the artist to share his coin collection. If he chose to do so, he could tell the story behind how he found each coin. It would be interesting to hear about the laminated 1977 quarter he got as change in a 7-11. Why he’d stoop down on such a busy intersection as Seventeenth Street and Broadway just to pick up a penny. If he was purchasing equipment for photographing his coin collection when he got the black-painted dime back as change at Cameta Camera.

Coin collecting would probably be deemed about as uncool as stamp collecting, and we want to know, What are the most rare coins our readers have found? Or, if you’re more the type to go throwing your unwanted change off buildings or into fountains, Where are the most unique penny-throwing places you’ve encountered?