TRAFFIC

Before the Metro de Santo Domingo was built, the Dominican government needed to show, visually and unambiguously, why the city could no longer be left to its road network alone. We were commissioned to fly the capital by helicopter and document the problem from above: the chronic congestion, the saturated interchanges, the bridges and avenues working far past what they were ever designed to carry. The brief was to make the case for the metro before the first tunnel was dug.

The gallery reads the city as a transport system in crisis. Highways thick with traffic in every direction. Interchanges spiralling through dense neighbourhoods. Cars stacked nose-to-tail in heat haze, photographed close enough to feel the engine noise. Shot mostly from the open door of a helicopter, road networks become graphic structures, and congestion stops being abstract and starts looking like exactly what it was: a city that had outgrown its own infrastructure, photographed in the moment before it built itself a new one.