With this year’s 40 photo contest winners appearing here and throughout the magazine, ENR senior art director Scott Hilling curated the images to take the reader through a visual narration of the ups and downs many in the industry experienced in 2021.

The ENR community came out in droves to participate in the annual Year in Construction Photo Contest: as photographers and submitters, and even helping to select the gatefold cover.  

See all the stunning visual drama of construction from an unprecedented and controversial year.

Despite a tumultuous year that made traveling to jobsites difficult at best, ENR readers still came through—and then some—by submitting more than 900 entries to our annual photo contest.

Why in this age of digitization we reap so much joy from photos whose subject is very solid and corporeal world of construction.

Crews knee-deep in grit and mud at a jobsite don’t often think about aesthetics, but under a photographer’s watchful gaze, intense action becomes frozen in time and often reflects a poignant beauty.

The photo that appears on the cover of this issue of ENR, a drill rig puncturing concrete or stone at the base of a new retaining wall being built in Chattanooga, Tenn., came out on top in online voting for the image that would make the best foldout cover.

ENR’s annual photo contest shows readers and online viewers how team effort, like the scene pictured here, gets construction projects done.

Selecting the photos for ENR’s  annual Year in Construction winners gallery offered lessons about the intersection of work, safety, beauty and construction. 

Our annual photo contest issue comes about as close as we can get to the direct delivery of reader­- driven content in ENR.