Abstract
When I first met Barbara Mensch in 2008, she introduced herself as a Manhattan-based photographer who was working on a series of photographs of the Brooklyn Bridge. Having just completed an exhibition on the Roeblings, the designers and builders of the bridge, I was well aware of the long shadows that their most famous creation seemed to cast on the American imagination. The Brooklyn Bridge has inspired writers (from Hart Crane to Marianne Moore to Jack Kerouac), painters (most notably Georgia O’Keeffe), and photographers (including Alfred Eisenstadt, Consuelo Kanaga, and Frank Spadarella). The Rutgers University Libraries Special Collections and University