You Are There

Early on in the movie Bull Durham, a character going to a baseball game walks from the dark underside of the stadium – where the stairs, bathrooms, and food concessions are – through one of the tunnels to the seats. The camera follows and, if you’ve ever been to stadium, the sudden sunlight and green of the playing field as you emerge from the tunnel is instantly recognizable. Regardless of whatever other virtues that movie may have, that moment was perfect, using a small piece of the built environment to dredge up memories for a lot of the audience.

This August 2018 photo by Carol Highsmith has an effect that’s something similar:

That’s the pedestrian walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge, looking west from just west of the Manhattan tower. In other words, we’re almost to the Manhattan end of the bridge. For once, I’m not going to talk about the skyline. This photo – intentionally – captures one aspect of what makes walking across the bridge so memorable. You can see all four main cables – the two inner cables almost directly overhead, and the two outer cables beyond the vertical suspenders and diagonal braces below the inner cables. The combination of the verticals and diagonals creates a plane of intersecting lines that, when seen at a sharp angle, is quite dense and clearly defined. If you look ahead here, toward the group of people, you see the suspenders and braces defining those planes against the sky. That’s the moment that anyone who has ever been on the bridge remembers.