Standing in the waters of a rapidly changing nation, the Brooklyn Bridge’s soaring stone arches and sweeping steel cables have made an indelible mark on millions as they pass through New York City. The bridge has been both a watershed piece of architecture and a source of artistic inspiration — all of which is celebrated in “Art of the Brooklyn Bridge: A Visual History” by Richard Haw.

“The book is about the personalities of the people who have found themselves on and around the bridge,” Mr. Haw said.

A richly illustrated look at how artists have incorporated the bridge into their work, the book is part social history, part literary history, and part visual history, a multidimensional portrait of the bridge through the eyes of those who used it to express themselves. A teacher of English and interdisciplinary studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, Mr. Haw is a self-described “multidisciplinary” thinker. “In order to understand the world, you have to think that way,” he said.

His first book on the Brooklyn Bridge was completed in 2005, but he described it as academic and “thesis-driven.” This time around, he decided to cast a wider net. “There’s a lot of fun stories in this book. The Brooklyn Bridge has attracted a ton of weirdos,” Mr. Haw said.

The bridge became a gathering place for New York’s more colorful and inventive society when a spate of fame-seekers turned bridge-jumping into performance art soon after the structure’s completion. They dressed in colored outfits and attempted — sometimes successfully, but often with fatal missteps — to profit from wagers and celebrity status. Clara McArthur leapt wearing a yellow cat suit, an American flag tied around her waist, and stockings filled with 20 pounds of sand to keep her from spinning in midair. Steve Brodie made a fortune off the publicity from a supposed midnight jump that he was never able to prove.

“It’s more of a social space,” Mr. Haw said, “a place where you go to experience New York.” He likens it to a park, a spot that can shift according to the needs of the ever-changing population that lives and breathes around, beneath, and over it.

During the Modern art movement, the bridge became the subject of artists such as Joseph Stella, Max Weber, and Ernest Lawson. Cubists such as Albert Gleizes and James Dougherty played with the shapes created by the crisscrossing suspension cables. Photographers began to produce heavily stylized photographs from many different angles — Eugene de Salignac shot from below the bridge, looking across the water, while Walker Evans photographed the arches from the bridge’s pedestrian walkway, looking up into the web of wires. “The bridge was an icon for Modernists,” Mr. Haw said. “They embraced it more than anything, like it was a gateway to progress.”

“I tried to show it from so many angles and points,” Mr. Haw said. “If you put all the images in a line, it would tell the story of the development and the history of art.” The book can be read as a visual essay of the last 125 years of American art, starting with landscape art and subsequently jumping from Impressionism to the Ashcan School, Modernism, Depression-era Realism, and various stages of Contemporary art.

The juxtapositions of these images tell more of a story than the images on their own. “It shows how one form gives way to another,” Mr. Haw said.

“The history of the Brooklyn Bridge is the history of art,” he said. He emphasized how Modernism ran “smack-bang into the social realism of the Depression. There’s a real wave of this representational art. And then, during the Second World War, you get this real documentary impulse.”

The historical element of New York City also plays a strong role in Mr. Haw’s interest. “It’s kind of an interesting way to remember or find out what the city used to look like,” he said, pointing to a photograph of dockworkers by the East River. “This was a working waterfront. The bridge ruined that. There used to be all these little ferries, and a thriving little village at what was the bottom of Fulton Street.”

Such is the price of growth, however. “They had to build the bridge,” Mr. Haw said with a shrug. “It’s the paradox of progress. Nothing can ever stay the same. It left some people behind; there were casualties, there always are. The bridge has so many contexts.”