When Jane Hinton's sons were old enough to leave home, she began searching out bridges. Bridges enthrall her. Talking about bridges excites her. When she travels, Hinton convinces security people on bridges to let her climb on top of them and underneath them, spending hours seeing what she can see through her cameras.

"When I'm viewing I'm in heaven," she says.

An exhibition titled "Jane Hinton: Bridges" opens today at the University Museum, timed to coincide with the final construction phases of the Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge in Cape Girardeau. Hinton will give a gallery talk at 5 p.m.

The show consists of 44 gelatin-silver images. Photographs of the Emerson Bridge can be found alongside her pictures of Scotland's monumental Firth of Forth Bridge and the historically important Eads Bridge in St. Louis.

The abstract qualities of the structures intrigue Hinton. University Museum director Dr. Stanley Grand writes of her photographs "exploring the dualities of tension and rest, flight

and gravity, tensile strength and inert mass ... ."

Her photographs respond to the artistic imperative of looking for a fresh way of seeing.

"I get excited when I hear people say, 'I look at bridges differently now,'" Hinton said in a phone interview from her home in Toronto, Canada.

There are suspension bridges, truss bridges and stone bridges in the show. The Emerson Bridge is a relatively new type of structure called a cable-stayed bridge.

But the photographs are more than striking and even haunting images. They reflect the opening of the American continent in the 19th century as railroads replaced canals and bridges supplanted ferries.

The Eads Bridge in St. Louis was the first steel bridge in America. James Buchanan Eads was a brilliant engineer who built ironclads for the Union during the Civil War and built this bridge, recently refurbished, with 500-foot spans nobody had ever attempted before.

The cantilevered Firth of Forth Bridge near Edinburgh, Scotland, rises 150 feet above the water. Hinton compares the artistry in the bridge's design to that of the Eiffel Tower.

Hinton studied painting and etching in London before finding her medium in the lens of a 35 mm camera. "I found the camera could get strength or the element of chance my hand couldn't," she said.

Most of her photographs are diptychs or triptychs combining more than one image into a whole.

The first bridge Hinton photographed was being torn down in Toronto. "It was almost like the Greek ruins ..." she said.

She slipped on boulders while photographing a bridge over the Columbia River between Spokane and Seattle. The resulting photograph is called "The Breaker." Despite a broken arm, she continued her photography trip "using my baby finger to focus."

Hinton sometimes uses a sterioscopic camera, not for the three-dimensional effect but for the chance images that can be captured. "You never know what's going to be next to each other," she says.

She doesn't use a tripod and develops her own film and prints the photographs herself. "I'm a very hands-on person," she said. "... You can look at Rembrandt's etchings where there are fingerprints on them."

Hinton is known for bridges, but she has photographed other subjects. Her first series was titled "Men with Round Glasses." It explored how men in different professions seemed to speak a language foreign to the rest of us.

In discovering beauty in bridges, she found that each one has its own story. As a photo artist, her difficult job is to tell it.

"Everybody has a camera," she said. "How are you going to do it that makes it unique?"

sblackwell@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182