“Deconstructing (The World We’ve Built)” is a series of photographic diptychs that aims to break down the complex nature of infrastructure.

For something that is so commonplace and generally overlooked by the public, infrastructure has an enormous potential to influence how millions of people live. Decade or century-long lifespans combined with historic funding shortages has created complex systems that are incredibly difficult to change once implemented.

On November 15, 2021, Congress signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) into law, a once-in-a-generation investment in our nation’s infrastructure. As a civil engineer by day and a photographer by night, I began to wonder about the influence of infrastructure, and, if given the opportunity to completely redo all of it, to completely deconstruct the world we’ve built, what kind of world we would create for each other today. What things could we change, knowing what we know now?

Each diptych is centered around one category of infrastructure, and consists of two photographic images from the same location - one nighttime landscape and one light painting. These photographs work together to explore the present and the unknown aspects of the possible future of these systems. It is simultaneously a documentation of this point in the life of that infrastructure as a waypoint tying the past to the present, and also a call to better and more inclusive infrastructure that works for everyone by setting a goal of taking the present into the future.

To be clear, there is no possible way to deconstruct the entire civilized world and rebuild it - the world we’ve built is what we have to work with. Perhaps, with the IIJA and with louder calls for infrastructure funding from the general public, we can at least begin to address some of the complexities that have arisen from these facilities, in order to make a better world for all of us.