"The Gateway"

October 1979. Someone stood directly beneath the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and pointed a camera straight up.

The result is one of the most unexpectedly graphic images in the Retrospect collection. Rather than the classic wide shot from across the Mississippi — the one on every postcard — this captures the arch from below, its two gleaming stainless steel legs rising on either side of the frame, converging toward a pale October sky in a composition that feels less like a landmark photograph and more like a piece of abstract architecture.

The Gateway Arch was completed in 1965, the tallest man made monument in the United States at 630 feet — designed by Finnish American architect Eero Saarinen as a monument to the westward expansion of the United States. Up close, from below, it is something else entirely — a study in curve and light, shadow and steel, the sky divided into something new.

Everyone has seen the Gateway Arch. Nobody has seen it quite like this.