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Photographer Davide Luciano doesn’t mind when gaping holes open in the city pavement. They just mean he has a place to store his extra spaghetti. Sure, to you a pothole may look like evidence of crumbling infrastructure, but to Luciano it looks like a nice place to garden, fish, or wash your dog.

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The photos, which Luciano says stemmed from his frustration with “the ridiculous pothole problem,” are set in New York, L.A., Toronto, and Montreal, because apparently Canada is outstripping us for terrible city maintenance just like they’ve outstripped us for garbage production.

Luciano’s photos are all fully staged with props, he says — no Photoshop trickery, just real-life spaghetti and dirt and what have you. Which doesn’t fully explain the one where a suspiciously human-looking hand is reaching up through the pavement, but maybe Luciano is so devoted to his no-‘Shop philosophy that he went and cut someone’s hand off. Or, hey, maybe that pothole is eight feet deep. Luciano is based in New York City, after all.

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