Cecelia Feld is a Dallas-based painter, printmaker and photographer.

She’s also owns the gift of timing.

Back in May 2011, she accompanied a videographer from the Trinity Trust shooting the construction of Santiago Calatrava’s new span over the Trinity River in Dallas.

The Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, which opened to much fanfare Saturday night, links downtown with West Dallas, a community that’s been neglected for decades.

“I was able to go there on a morning in May at eight o’clock,” she says.  “It was one of those ‘Oh-My-God!,’ beautiful-blue-Texas-sky mornings – when you say it’s really nice to work in Texas.”

She covered the site like the morning dew, working both sides – shooting up, back, down and across.  Though the complex web of cables was far from complete, she still managed to capture their form and interconnectivity, all in the abstract. 

She did not neglect the environment.

“One shot shows the bridge in context, with yellow flowers across a field,” she says.  “I took that photograph knowing that someday the field won’t be there, because of the plans for development of the Trinity River bottom area.  There are going to be acres and acres of roadways, parks and water features.”

The bridge is freighted with multiple meanings.  For the citizens of Dallas, it stands for a reunification of two parts of town, long separated.  For the developers, there’s plenty of opportunity.  And for the aesthetes in town, used to dropping names like Foster, Pei, Maynes, Koolhaas and Piano as they speak of local landmarks, it’s one more feather in their cap.

So it’s about art, but function too.  “It’s a beautiful way to get from one part of Dallas to another,” she says.  “It’s a symbol of what we aspire to be, and a beautiful sculptural addition to the city.”

“The Bridge,” her exhibition of photography, is on display through April 15 at the Dallas Center for Architecture.  It depicts Calatrava’s sculpture as it’s being worked on – a bridge in the state of becoming, in the place for which it was designed.

“The white light was glistening against the Texas sky,” she says.  “It was like white shoelaces being tied onto bright blue sneakers.”

There’s nothing so poetic as a photographer with a sense of timing – unless it’s one who understands the power of metaphor.

For more on Cecelia Feld, go to http://www.studio7310.com/

For more on Santiago Calatrava, go to http://www.calatrava.com/

For more on the Dallas Center for Architecture, go to http://dallascfa.com/

For more on the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, go to http://www.thetrinitytrust.org/

[slideshow id=597]