Sometimes I previsualize an image before taking a photograph. An image can have a powerful effect on the imagination. The image on the left is a painting of the Whitestone Bridge that I had seen a couple of years ago in a museum in Buffalo, New York, at The Albright-Knox Gallery. I had already started shooting bridges and I was entranced by the graceful line and uncluttered simplicity and beauty of this image. I stood and studied its composition for a long time. I took a photograph of the painting which is what you have before you. I remember thinking at the time that I want to get a shot of this bridge. I wasn't yet familiar with the Whitestone Bridge. I had only been working a year or so and I had taken the Verrazano, the Bayonne, the Brooklyn, the Manhattan, the Queensboro, and the George Washington bridges, but not this one. It would be another two years before I would get out there to shoot the Whitestone and I forgot about this painting, but something of its composition remained with me unconsciously. I spent two days shooting the Whitestone from both sides of the East River, from the Bronx side in misty, rainy weather, and on the Queens side on a day of fair weather clouds and lots of blue sky. As I drove up to the toll and paid the $5.50 to cross, I reached for my camera that I had ready and waiting on the passenger seat, and with my left hand on steering wheel and my right hand holding the camera up to my eye and looking through the viewfinder, I began pressing the shutter as I rode up and up and over the long span of the bridge. I was going as slowly as I could. My photograph on the right is the result of one of those frames. Now that I look and now that I compare my photograph with the painting, I see how influenced I was.
I realize that photography had a major influence on painting from the time of its invention in the mid-19th century. It freed painters to paint other things and helped give birth to Impressionism since painters no longer had to paint realistically. But later on, painting would influence photography as is the case with many of the earlier pictorial photographers such as Cameron, Stieglitz and Steichen. The two mediums are constantly working alongside each other since at the end of the day picture making is picture making.
I love how the bridge in the painting tilts skyward at such a steep incline that it looks as if it could take you right up and into the clouds. In my imagining the Whitestone bridge from just looking at the painting, I imagined that it might have been that steep somehow, and it was that quality that I was unconsciouly after in my pre-visualization of what I thought the bridge would look like. I think that I was pretty close given that the two towers in my shot are lined up exactly the way they line up in the painting. There is no way that I could photograph an incline that steep because it isn't there in reality. It was there for the painter in his imagination and I don't know if the painter was painting from a sketch or a photograph, or from standing there. It would be pretty difficult to stand there and paint, unless the bridge were closed. I had to be in a car and that was risky.
