CONCRETE DELICACY.

Byline: PAUL WEIDEMAN

Jamey Stillings' luminous, crystal-clear photographs of a canyon bridge under construction seem to vibrate between the extremes of gossamer and thick concrete. From a distant perspective, the bridge arch looks kind of lonely, like the wind could blow it over.

"Oh, it's supersolid," the photographer said. "What's interesting to me is that this bridge, depending on where you are, can look like the most delicate little line that could collapse at any time, and then up closer, you see how massive it is, and all of a sudden it becomes this sort of Mad Maxian thing." The "delicate little line" actually consists of two gigantic, rectangular tubes of multilayered reinforced concrete side by side.

Stillings' photography of the bridge, featured in an exhibition at Photo-eye Gallery in Santa Fe, began during a slow time last March.

He and his assistant took off on a road trip toward a solar-energy project in southern Nevada and the Mojave desert "to get the creative juices going," as he put it in a recent sit-down interview. When they stopped by Hoover Dam, they discovered the monumental bridge project under way.

The photographer stayed for 24 hours, focusing especially on dawn and dusk shots of the Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge -- the official name for the new structure being built over the Colorado River. It's the middle portion of the Hoover Dam Bypass Project, which was designed to relieve traffic on the old, twisty road that goes right over the dam.

"After we spent a day, I had enough imagery; I was convinced there was something there," Stillings said. "This thing is all about your childhood fascination with Erector Sets combined with your love for big construction projects and abandoned warehouses and just the scope of something that, even on an adult level, you can't comprehend: this huge thing leaping across two sides of the canyon, the magnificence of it as a man-made structure."

The project, which he has photographed ever since and which won't be complete for another year, first involved the construction of a vast arch -- technically speaking, a twin-rib tubular concrete arch 1,060 feet long -- that spans the Arizona and Nevada sides of Black Canyon. Workers built each of the two arch segments out and upward from the two canyon walls; the arch halves were married in the center of the span in August. The next phase involves construction of the roadway and a series of strutlike, supporting pylons built along the arch.

Stillings' stunning photography, including nighttime pictures of the bridge illuminated by hundreds of lights, was first featured in The New York Times Magazine. "I like shooting around dawn and dusk, the transitional times," Stillings said. "I kind of knew aesthetically what was appealing to me, and I felt like The New York Times Magazine was the right way to go, because I thought they would see the rationale from both the historical and aesthetic standpoints."

To capture the singular images he has composed at the bridge site, Stillings depends on his Canon digital SLR camera. However, it's the eye behind the camera that does the real work. The Oregon native first learned these ropes in the fourth grade using a Kodak Brownie camera and developing film and pictures in a darkroom built in a friend's basement.

The budding photographer went on to earn his bachelor's degree in art at Willamette University and his master's degree in photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Now a professional photographer for more than 25 years, he lives in Santa Fe with his wife, photographer Esha Chiocchio, and two children.

It sounds like Stillings made the transition from film to digital technology painlessly. "There are definitely things about film that I love, but now that digital has been around long enough, there's a fluidity to the work flow that I've adapted to," he said. "Particularly in the editing phase and working with the photos in Photoshop. For me there's a very fluid process that actually feels more at home for me than the darkroom ever did.

"There are also things you can do now that you simply couldn't do with film. One of the bridge images was shot ... [when] I didn't have the access that I have now. I took it out of the car window, at night, and it's sharp and able to be blown up. You can't really tell it apart from the other images."

Stillings has done a good deal of documentary photography in Central America in the past, and he suspects that if he were to go back to Nicaragua today, knowing that he could get beautiful pictures shooting in low light, his whole approach would change. "In discussions that I have with other photographers, one of the things we sometimes miss that we had with the Hasselblad and the 4x5 cameras is the pace," he said. "But most of what I'm doing for the bridge project is more akin to the view-camera process, using a tripod and taking more time."

The timing of his approach to The New York Times Magazine was fortuitous, because his bridge photos fit perfectly into a special architecture/infrastructure issue the journal published in June. The piece about his work was titled "Bridge to Somewhere."

Meanwhile, construction authorities, seeing his letter of assignment

from the Times, granted him increased access to the bridge. "I've been

working with the Federal Highway Administration and the Bureau

of Reclamation and private contractors, and I still wish I had total

access," he said. "I've been on the roadbed and on top of the pylons,

the temporary towers, but I haven't been allowed on the arch, which

is a disappointment."

Stillings said his overall rationale for pursuing this project was the result of several things seeming to converge. "One is that we remember monumental things because of photography. So there's the geographical connection to Hoover Dam and the fact that this is going to be the longest arch bridge in the country. And there's the historic component, where I felt it was worthwhile to be documented. And aesthetically it was compelling.

"One morning, the number-two guy at the bridge, Bob Nichols, who's with the Federal Highway Administration, wanted to visit.

One of the things he said was, 'What's your agenda? Everybody's got kind of an agenda.' I said, 'I think it's the ability to create win-win imagery. It celebrates the incredible work you guys are doing and, historically, if it gets photographed with an aesthetic eye, it can stand the test of time.' If you think about the FHA work, for example -- if we hadn't documented the Depression, we wouldn't feel it like we do.

"There's a challenge to a project like this, because if you're simply trying to do an evolution of the bridge, that's one approach," Stillings said. "If you're just interested in well-composed images with perfect lighting, that gives you something else. But if you're trying to find a way to elevate the image or to celebrate the subject ... for me I'm really trying to find a moment that conveys something different than just a literal shot."

Scale is an important aspect in these photographs. One of the prints in the Photo-eye show is bigger than the others -- it's a vertical bridge photo 40 inches high and 27 inches wide -- and Stillings hopes in the future to do a larger exhibition with larger prints like that. "I want them big enough that it starts to impart something of the feeling you have at the bridge site," he said. "The determining factor for me is the notion that you can stand back and see the whole, then go in and explore the amazing detail."

details

Jamey Stillings: The Bridge at Hoover Dam

Exhibit through Nov. 28

Photo-eye Gallery, 376-A