The Old Bay Bridge

An 8x10-inch documentary with limited-edition prints and book.

Rocky McCorkle’s historic documentation of the dismantling of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco is a loving portrait of a long-lost landmark. The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, known locally as the Bay Bridge, is a complex of bridges spanning the San Francisco Bay in California. It officially opened in 1936, six months before the Golden Gate Bridge. It carried about 260,000 vehicles a day on its two decks and had one of the longest spans in the United States. Starting in 2014, the old eastern section of the bridge was disassembled, removing individual pieces in the reverse order of the original construction. Observing this process in tandem from 2014–2015, Rocky's spectacular color photographs are one-of-a- kind recordings of a bridge on its last leg slowly disappearing into memory.

To capture these intimate moments, each day Rocky had to carry his 8x10 camera, film holders, and tripod 7 miles round-trip to get to the construction zone. As if the process wasn’t difficult enough, he felt it was only appropriate to shoot the discontinued bridge with discontinued large format film. Rocky’s crisp exposures convey time, the beauty of aging, and features the San Francisco landscape that we love. All 12 high-resolution images on display at Art Ventures Gallery are sure to be enjoyed by both the architecture and art lover.