Before Brooklyn

A Passage Through Structure, Light, and Memory

Before Brooklyn began in rain and uncertainty, during a solitary night crossing of John A. Roebling’s bridge over the Ohio River. Completed before his more famous Brooklyn Bridge, this earlier span carries the engineering language that would come to define Roebling’s monumental work. In darkness, that engineering revealed itself through fragments—cables, stone, geometry, reflected light and the rhythm of an occasional passing car.

Beneath it all, the river moved silently.

These photographs follow that crossing as I experienced it: from apprehension to wonder, from structure to abstraction, and finally from permanence into memory.