Chicago Drawbridges
The drawbridges spanning the Chicago River are among the city’s most distinctive examples of working architecture. Built across different eras, they combine engineering, utility, and an unexpected visual elegance, especially when raised against the surrounding skyline.
This series of black-and-white photographs focuses less on the bridges as transportation infrastructure and more on their forms, surfaces, and relationships to the surrounding city. Steel trusses, rivets, roadway decks, lamps, and mechanical structures become graphic elements, while familiar buildings appear between and beyond them in constantly changing combinations.
Photographed from close range and unexpected angles, the raised bridges create temporary compositions that vanish when they are lowered. Their dark industrial forms intersect with glass towers, historic buildings, open sky, and the river itself, transforming familiar parts of downtown Chicago into something more abstract, revealing a beauty in the ordinary infrastructure that is easy to overlook when simply crossing from one side of the river to the other.
