I began photographing bridges in 1983 for a faculty show. I was teaching a course on “Technology and Society” in addition to Photography courses in the Art Department at the State University of New York at Brockport.
It was the 100th anniversary of the Brooklyn Bridge and there was a big celebration in New York City. At the same time, a lift bridge in the St. Lawrence Seaway was making news because it was stuck half open and freighters were backing up in the Great Lakes. Then I discovered David McCullough's “The Great Bridge,” the epic story of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. Those things revealed bridges as much more complicated than I had thought.
I found an old railroad truss bridge in Brockport that someone had painted “Lionel” across. There were two lift bridges across the Erie Canal in Brockport and several big bridges including an old swing bridge across the Genesee River in Rochester. It sounded like it would be a worthy project for the show and not hard to shoot in a couple of days. I never expected to be interested in making anymore beyond the 8 or 10 photographs I needed for the show, but I surprised myself. The prints were interesting to look at and the bridges looked like they could have been sculptures. I began to notice that bridges are everywhere—and are important to the way we live.
I photographed a couple of dozen bridges with a 2 1/4 inch square format camera the first year and then switched to a 4 x 5 view camera because the horizontal format seemed more appropriate for the subjects, and it allowed me to make bigger prints.
I photographed about 145 bridges between 1983 and 1994 and am now collecting “Stories About Bridges” for a future book.
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