Untroubled Waters

The length of the Mississippi River, from Lake Itasca, Minnesota, to the Gulf of Mexico, is generally agreed to be 2,320 miles, crossed by some 230 bridges. Fortunately for Lafayette photographer Philip Gould, who has embarked on a project to photograph the bridges of the Mississippi, he’s decided “only” to photograph the most interesting seventy-five. “The architecturally distinctive, historically important ones. I can’t tell you what I’m looking for, exactly. There are some bridges that just resonate.”

One that resonated is one of the more spectacular spans over the lower Mississippi, the John James Audubon Bridge, which crosses the river south of St. Francisville. One Sunday afternoon in late April, Gould and a couple of kayakers approached the bridge from the east bank, the massive superstructure soaring away westward, ablaze in the setting sun. “For this photo I wanted to capture the sense of coming upon this mighty bridge out of the wilderness,” he explained. Gould intends to capture a representative sample of architectural styles—from the log that crosses the river fifty feet from its headwaters at Lake Itasca, to the mighty cable-stayed spans of the Lower Mississippi—and a variety of viewpoints—from the water, from high overhead, and as a riverboat captain might first spy a bridge when rounding a riverbend far downstream—in order to portray the river as a whole. “There’s nothing about the Mississippi that ties the whole thing together in our imagination,” he observed. “People in Minnesota see it one way; St. Louis people know it another way. But a bridge stitches and joins two pieces of cultural fabric together. I want to focus on [the bridges] in an architectural, a geographic, and a community sense, and to depict the humanity that’s central to these spans.”

Gould is teaming up with his wife, ULL Professor of Sociology Margot Hasha, who will research the history behind each span and offer accompanying text on its cultural context. The couple is in discussion with publishers, and expect to be at work on their subject for a year. Stay tuned.