The Golden Gate Bridge has been photographed so often that it can seem exhausted as a subject. Michael Yuan’s The Bridge, published by The Eriskay Connection in 2022, proceeds from a different premise: that a structure this familiar is best approached closely rather than panoramically. Yuan works against the postcard vantage, giving himself over to the bridge’s component parts — imposing towers, stylised street lamps, gigantic cables, bolts and plates — and to the specific geometry, colour, sound and light each one carries. What results is less a survey of a landmark than a study of its form, lines, shapes and distinctive colour.

The book keeps its ambitions proportionate to its format. At 221 by 329 millimetres and 96 pages, in a flexible hardcover, it is substantial enough to let detail breathe without turning into a monument of its own. Carel Fransen’s design has to hold together a sequence of forms that are, by definition, repetitive, and the book’s interest lies partly there — in how photographs of steel resolve into rhythm. A poem by Joseph B. Strauss, the bridge’s chief engineer, is also included, opening with the lines “At last the mighty task is done; / Resplendent in the western sun.” The first edition was 800 copies.

For collectors, the appeal is not a claim about scarcity but a question of position. Most photographic treatments of the Golden Gate operate at the scale of the whole span; Yuan’s operates at the scale of the part, and the book’s coherence comes from that decision being sustained across the sequence rather than applied intermittently. It rewards the kind of looking that a large-format object invites: slowly, and at length.