Springs Preserve exhibit documents construction of new Hoover Dam bridge

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Too late to re-edit "Vertigo"?

Pity.

Soon as someone stops this art gallery from spinning, we’ll explain.

"There were times we needed to be roped," says New Mexico photographer Jamey Stillings, he and his assistant clearly not acrophobia sufferers.

"Aside from being photographically compelling to watch a bridge work its way across two sides of a canyon to meet in the center, it was challenging to photograph from the air and the ground at night … things that are moving and with wind. We’d climb a cliff two hours before sunset and climb down after sunset. We knew coming down would be dicey."

Perhaps he didn’t need to down a Dramamine, but Springs Preserve visitors could be forgiven for reaching for it, eyeballing often dizzying images — a gallery scrapbook, in effect — documenting the stage-by-stage construction of the new Mike O’Callaghan-Pat Tillman Memorial Bridge at Hoover Dam.

"I tried to treat the canyon, the bridge and the dam as a three-dimensional chessboard, thinking about shots I’d already taken, where the bridge was in construction, where the sun would be at that time of year, and keep layering and building a visual diary of the bridge."

Crystalline sharp and stunning in scale and scope, the photos at the Preserve’s Patio Gallery were taken by Stillings starting in March 2009. Set against the dam’s imposing vistas, they ogle underneath, overhead and across the massive structure and graceful archway for U.S. Route 93, as its opposing ends slowly emerged out of each mountain face to link the Nevada and Arizona sides of the Black Canyon like elegant Legos about to snap into place. Finally, they rendezvous 880 feet above the Colorado River.

Stretching 1,900 feet across and 1,500 feet downstream from the dam, the $114 million span — the nation’s first combined concrete/steel arch bridge and second-highest, with the longest concrete arch in the Western Hemisphere — is the signature structure of the $240 million Hoover Dam Bypass Project. It opened Oct. 19, diverting traffic between Nevada and Arizona off of the dam.

"He shows us how we’re so miniscule compared to the geography around us," says Aaron Micallef, Springs Preserve’s programming supervisor. "People like to see when nature has been tamed by us. I’m not saying taming nature is the best thing, often it’s a fool’s errand, but it’s that whole sense of human achievement, that we as human beings have climbed that mountain for the first time."

Shot in bright daylight, lit against the nighttime sky and, most strikingly, snapped against the setting sun as dusk repaints the mountains in an orange glow, the 30-plus, large-scale photos capture a jewel wedged across the canyon, distinguished by 15 pairs of precast columns and "tub" girders supporting the deck.

"Look at this one, it’s already built!" a child exclaims, sprinting from photo to photo at the gallery in a running narrative to the adults around him.

Visiting from Houston, Lilly Holland is unstinting in her praise. "It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen as far as photography exhibits go," she says. "The angles and the views are spectacular. I’ve seen the bridge, but this gives it a whole different perspective. Even when you see it, you can’t capture all of that like you can seeing it here."

Accompanying Holland, her mother, Elsie Ethridge, adds that "the angles they were taken at, they play with your brain. You start thinking, was he dangling or in a helicopter? You have to be very creative to do this."

Images expose workers dotting the towering landscape like sprinkles on an ice cream sundae. Suspended in dangling "man baskets," they shuttle back and forth from the construction sites and stride up the archway that dwarfs them like toy figures.

"It’s amazing to see these daring men out there," says gallery-goer Kristy Robinson. "I could never imagine something so scary. It really shows how strong a person you have to be to build something like that, like the guys who originally built the dam. It’s a new generation of guys building the bridge to go over it."

That element, Stillings says, helps humanize the project’s progression that struck him differently, depending on the angles from which he shot the pictures. "From the air, it looks very delicate and light, especially when it just had the arch across the river," Stillings says. "But when you’re down below it, coming around the hairpin turn around the Nevada side and you look across, it’s very massive. And the human element really grounds you in what the scale is."

Connective tissue of steel and concrete amid looming slabs of rock, the two ends of the span, depicted separately in some shots, almost assume the quality of a living, breathing organism with emotions — as if one end is yearning to reach over and finally touch the other.

"It’s very metaphorical to see it in 2009, arguably the central year of the Great Recession," Stillings says. "To see an arch going across a canyon high above a river, I thought that was a positive comment about our capabilities of problem-solving and finding solutions."

And of creating a new market for sales of Dramamine.

Contact reporter Steve Bornfeld at sbornfeld@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0256.