For engineers, the landscape of the Black Canyon is America’s great playground — an intricately carved challenge to the best of technology.

For the photographer Jamey Stillings, that intersection between nature and humankind fueled a different sort of engineering: the challenge of documenting a massive construction project.

In early 2009, with no major studio projects ahead of him, Mr. Stillings persuaded his assistant to hit the road to collect images “the old-fashioned way.” Heading for the Mojave Desert, they stopped to photograph a dramatic ring of mineral deposits outlining Lake Mead. They turned around and spotted a bridge, large and unfinished. They fell immediately for its visual complexity.

The Hoover Dam bypass bridge, which opened to the public in October 2010, is supposed to ease traffic flow across the dam. It spans the Colorado River gorge, connecting Nevada and Arizona. Its construction echoed that of the Hoover Dam during the Great Depression; like the dam, it became a concrete sign of resilience, rising against the odds of both nature and the economy with what Mr. Stillings calls “Mad Max-ian massiveness.”

James Stillings

As he watched the bridge sprout high into the air above the river, Mr. Stillings had to negotiate with state and federal agencies to get the images he wanted. He knew he needed to do more than document the construction. He began to plan each shot meticulously.

“I would be lying there in bed at night thinking about where the sun was going to be in a couple of months and what the next phase of the bridge might be,” said Mr. Stillings, a fine art, documentary and commercial photographer who had previously documented the construction of two bridges: in Rochester, N.Y., and Cleveland.

But what really sustained his passion — and the 1,000-mile round-trips from Santa Fe — was the wider historical significance of the construction. The Empire State Building, the Eiffel Tower, the Hoover Dam — the imagery their births created is burned into the collective memory.

Mr. Stillings’s images have a sublime quality, too. A hundred years from now, when technology moves on and the magic fades, they may be a testament to a complicated harmony.