Some people photograph mountains. Some people photograph architecture. Alex Nitzman photographs the infrastructure that gets everybody there. Alps Roads has been online since 1997, documenting roads, streets, highways, signs, bridges, and the miscellaneous concrete machinery of getting from one place to another.
The site is immediately recognizable as a project that grew over time rather than being rebuilt every few years around whatever a design agency thought a homepage should look like. It offers road material directly, including mirrors and accommodations for older browsers. Its footer runs from 1997 through 2026. That is not simulated retro styling. It is continuity.
The photographs are the important part. Roads change constantly in ways that are easy to overlook while the work is happening. Signs are replaced. Interchanges are rebuilt. Lane markings change. Old route shields disappear. Bridges are widened or demolished. A temporary traffic pattern becomes permanent, and ten years later it can be difficult to remember what was there before.
A road enthusiast with a camera therefore becomes an accidental historian.
Alps Roads contains the kinds of images that official transportation agencies often have little reason to preserve publicly: ordinary approaches to interchanges, sign assemblies, local streets, unusual route configurations, and roadside details that seemed unremarkable on the day they were photographed. The older those images become, the less ordinary they are.
There is an interesting Web-design lesson here too. Photography sites today are frequently treated as galleries first and references second. Alps Roads organizes images around places and road systems. The point is not an algorithmic stream of attractive pictures. The point is that somebody looking for a particular highway can find the material associated with it.
That makes the collection useful to several groups at once: road enthusiasts, local historians, sign researchers, transportation nerds, and people trying to answer the wonderfully specific question, “What did this interchange look like before they rebuilt it?”
Projects like this are why independent websites remain worth finding. The 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list is full of similar cases where one person’s narrow interest quietly became a historical resource after enough years passed.
Explore the road photography at Alps Roads
A highway page from 1997 does not need to have predicted the future. It only needed to keep the photographs.