ENR’s annual photo contest brings attention to inspiring construction photographs and the workers and projects they depict. But the contest is also designed to show appreciation for the people who take their cameras onto jobsites, often under difficult conditions, and capture great images.
The construction industry simply wouldn’t have these pictures otherwise.
So we thank photographers like Veronica Romitelli, who slogged through the mud of a cold riverbank in Germany from pre-dawn into the night to capture the moment a 1.2 kilometer-long section of pipeline was dragged up into the air from beneath the Elbe River, completing Europe’s longest and largest-diameter pipeline crossing.
We thank Petros Zouzoulas, a Parsons transportation architect shooting in choking dust and the “brutally bright” sunlight of summertime Dubai where the 113ºF temperature made it hard to even handle his camera.
We thank Keith Philpott for squeezing behind a worker in a dark, loud work space so tight he had to “shoot from the hip” because he couldn’t get his head behind his camera.
And we thank Harvey Smith, documenting construction barehanded in -4º F temperatures high above Moscow, living his dream. “You can’t work a camera in thick gloves,” he says. Thank you, photo contest submitters all. The slideshow is attached to the lead image.