Infrastructure: Highway Deconstructed

This photoessay explores infrastructure from a creative perspective. My engagement with the building of this highway is to transform the construction sites into contemporary landscapes.

Steven Benson - Artist Statement

 Infrastructure: Highway Deconstructed

      The altered landscape has been an integral element of my photographic practice. For the past nine-years, I’ve been creating images that explore the activities and artifacts associated with the process of transforming the landscape by the construction underway for an enormous highway infrastructure project. My goals are very different from anyone else working on the new I-4 highway running through Central Florida. The engineers and construction workers are focused on weight loads and distribution, gravity, traffic flow and water runoff. I’m exploring the construction process from a perspective of re-interpretation and transformation.     The aesthetic strategy I weave into the imagery would normally be associated with the way photographers have approached national parks like Yosemite or Yellowstone. I’m intrigued with the idea of producing images using rebar, concrete and dirt to create beautiful seductive photographs as a way to draw attention to the effects of our interaction with the land. Using aesthetics this way can function as a political statement to undermine the viewers expectations.  The complexity of the construction process is experienced as a Surreal undertaking and is included in the visual language of the photographs.       There are serious environmental considerations to include when designing an infrastructure project. The photographs are made in Florida but large construction projects that impact wetlands and animal migration are being built all over the world. Significant efforts are being made to address environmental concerns. The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, for example, now spans the 101 Freeway in Agoura Hills near Los Angeles. (Weather issues have pushed completion to sometime in 2026.)      I’m reminded of Margaret Bourke-White when she said, “... industrial forms were all the more beautiful because they were never designed to be beautiful. They had a simplicity of line that came from their direct application of purpose. Industry... had evolved an unconscious beauty – often a hidden beauty that was waiting to be discovered"            The process of making these photographs occur as collaborative activities with individuals I only know through the evidence of their actions. I incorporate the actions of others to recontextualize their effect on the land. I’m imagining a future where National Parks will be abandoned factories.  The film ‘Brazil’ comes to mind.