Architecture of Cities: Two-Lane Blacktop

Architect: Tadao Ando: Pulitzer Arts Foundation: St Louis

Imagine for thirteen seconds or thereabouts: Debussy’s Clair de lune: Miles Davis’ first three chords from Sketches of Spain: Led Zeppelin’s first chord from Stairway to Heaven: The musical overlay teases the reverberating echos in my ears: The virgin Screech Owls’ wings free fall amid the hurricanes’ ascension:

I recalled my introduction to Chaïm Soutine: He had sold multiple paintings to Alfred Barnes: He needed validation for his past and what lie ahead: He ran dressed as if the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Fantasia from Paris to Cap d’antibes: I imagined:

Arriving at the white sands: Soutine’s enervating journey flatlined: He caught sight of his benefactor and begged for something Barnes could not give him: Soutine wanted more: Soutine wanted creative answers that Barnes was not equipt to offer: Soutine accepted a non descript suggestion from Barnes: Soutine ran breathlessly back to Paris with nothing: Nothing that might matter:

Architect: Arata Isozaki: Sant Jordi Palace: Barcelona

Eleven elephants: Nine white albino pigmy orangutans: Seventeen Black Birds with white beaks: The other animals of equatorial jungles and seas follow: There was a hut at the end of the road: All of the above stepped inside delicately:

When my eyes have to think, I am consumed by voices: I dream of many: Sometimes my mind imagines: Something deductive scientific: Something compulsive: Something sweet and dreamy: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, George Simenon and Beatrix Potter play appropriate roles: Absurd and abstract? Then imagine standing alone on a two lane black top going nowhere and anywhere you would like it to: My eyes sit on a road: The road is a two lane highway facing in the directions of east and west: Maybe: Not sure if it matters as every road leads to discovery:

Most days I hear my breathing pause: An extremely invasive inhale signifies a pause: My mind never has a pause: I collect myself: I beg for anything sweet, prophetic and poetic: Michael Caine’s recitation of my Kipling’s “If” is heard somewhere: My mirrored reflection is seen almost naked as I recite T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land: Wrestling with every last moment of light: I see that I have lived an entire life in poetic reconnaissance: I have for more decades… been on a mission to see.

Architect: Arata Isozaki: MOCA Los Angeles

It is only a moment to remember: I pause:

The essence of most moments appear in held hands: Arata Isozaki saw the Guggenheim Rotunda as a place to commune with architectural adventure: We talked.

We greeted each other with held hands: His Tokyo studio library was room for a communing of two: Two minds of separate ages and unique identity shared what matters in architecture: I hardly remember what he shared: I do  remember everything: Most of my decades live in some corner of my mind: My thirty seconds with Arata Isozaki seem like forever:

I stood with Tadao in my New York studio for a mere hour: I stood with Tadao in front of his International Library of Children’s Literature,Tokyo: Did the improbable experiences from thirty seconds or three days collectively become a forever moment: Certainly two great aesthetic minds have enhanced my vision beyond recognition:

Soutine’s breathless, enervating, flailing flatline is consuming: I prefer to follow my eyes as they prance like mice and deer along my streets and strides: My every direction: My life framed in analog or digital is my tomorrow.

Cinema’s Two-Lane Blacktop is not great art: It does though remind me that the emptiness evident in horizons: The din of claustrophobia that may live in cities are among thousand of film moments and movements film movements  that emphatically influence my moments: My eyes: Never has an entire film been remembered: But imagine from an entire two or four hours of film, remains a purpose. Embossed across my eyes is something breathless: My purpose: My voyage across somewhere.

Architect: Tadao Ando: Inspired by Issey Miyake: 21-21 Design Sight: Tokyo

Architecture of Cities: Twice Told Tales

Architects: Philip Johnson and Richard Foster: Elmer Holmes Bobst Library: New York University

“You're asking me will my love grow

I don't know, I don't know

You stick around, now it may show

I don't know, I don't know”.

Something

George Harrison

And

The Beatles

Every known structure was designed or built as an understanding of what may be a purpose: Whether a shrine or a box, purpose mattered:

The best of architects have walked alone without imagining: The best architects imagine:

From the Renaissance to Modernism: Filippo Brunelleschi to Oscar Niemeyer and everyone between and after: I have sought out their lives: I have photographed what they have imagined, what remains: 

I interpret the experiences: Their experiences become mine: Their structures were designed to explore not echo others: I have only attempted to see them, to hear their voices:

Architect: Cesar Pelli: Bloomberg Headquarters: New York City

Three-hundred years of photographers before me: Their lenses have become mine: The lives of cities in our lenses is a life worth imagining:

My many  thousand frames are meant to be  shared: The exterior of my interior thoughts retrace my visual heart embedded in my history:

I stood in Mark Rothko’s studio: I remember how he valued the silence: Maybe he dreamed of the silence I inhabit:

I held hands with Oscar Niemeyer: We silently drafted ideas together: Not more than one-hundred words spoken in English, French nor Portuguese: It seemed we talked about our century together

I talked about my miles in Tokyo: Arata Isozaki grabbed my hand as we walked into his study:

I remember everything we talked about: I remember how he offered his moment:

Philip Johnson shared his acres of real estate for an entire day and years beyond: The conversations were silently raucous: Every word meant more than the light of the day: The days became volumes: My life encased with another in an unnatural storybook:

Architect: Richard Rogers Stirk Harbour+Partners: Neo Bankside

The buildings my cameras capture, have another life: The quietude of the unknown

When Filippo Brunelleschi wanted to show the accomplishment of his design, his room was empty:

When every designer of another time wanted to celebrate the moment to share: The rooms were empty: So we imagine. In the moment it is what we hear our voices say that grab us by the heart: But who is there to hear our…:

By minute and by hour my camera recognizes a pose: My mind sets it but who else hears what I do:

George Frederic Handel and Jimi Hendrix left a legacy that most have not seen: If you allow, they appear side by side: If you wander, your mind may fantasize: Their London Brook Street address by itself is quite banal: Side by side there is only something that a visual composition may imagine: It is the Messiah entangled in The Wind Cries Mary: When you can listen to the sides inside the building may you interpret the importance of an architectural capture:

It is like a winter storm colliding with a sirocco: Something beautiful happens: New dreams unfold: Does the African Bongo mate with the Arctic Polar Bear: Does the black raven balance an Orangutans its talons: What happens across millenniums: What if Nero lived: What might the Colosseum be: What if Thoreau stood naked at Walden: If Napoleon danced with Nietzsche:

All the ideas that flourish in a mere fraction as the camera awaits the command: 

Authors and artists imagine success: They live in realities dreams everyday: The clock ticks, the page closes the canvas drips the paint dries: It is the way of being alone with a rollicking imagination that makes life matter: Then w imagine others: Maybe Hawthorne, Melville, Crane and Twain come to mind: Maybe there are battles and heroics never imagined before: They were alone” Alone and abounding with the moment that is a finale: But it is not: There is no sound: Only passion abounds: Hendrix and Handel return: I am alone on Brook street: The music plays as one ensemble:

I am alone: The camera shutter vibrates:

Tomorrow begins:

Architect Ricardo Bofill: Walden 7 Sant Just Desvern

Architecture of Cities: Something Beautiful Something Captured

Melding ideas in a single frame

Three or maybe five Zebra Finch question the means to fornicate backwards:

Eleven black crows swayed anxiously: Costumed in magpie camouflage: The bevy of black crows royal personage awaited: Adorned in baby Chinese Panda markings; three almost large orcas oscillated with stunning propulsion: The whitened arctic icebergs stood frozen: 

Our eyes see through our hearts: Or is it possibly our heart sees through our eyes:

The film Mephisto brings us the darkness from another time: Klaus Maria Brandauer lives through us: The film Apocalypse Now brings us the darkness from another time: Marlon Brando lives through us: The film  Perfect Days brings us the joy from another time: Koji Yakusho lives through us:

A brew of celluloid dressings in a stew: The crosswinds are near: So we wait. There is a spell on the horizon: So we wait: There is an emotional albatross ahead: My mind imagines, so we wait: Melding of ideas is dangerously beautiful: We wait:

United States Holocaust Memorial: Architect James Into Freed: Pei,Cobb and Freed

I have not yet photographed the Obama Presidential Library: There is a story there: There are stories minted in Chicago’s Jackson Park: There are stories minted in Obama’s Presidency: The stories maybe true: Maybe the stories are not what they seem: I must capture what needs to be seen: Histories are evolving before our eyes: Irregular lives are ahead: Far or near life has an intended rollercoaster that illustrates almost everything: History can no longer afford to be missed:

My camera can no longer afford to miss history: My camera can no longer afford to skip a heart beat: To skip over even the smallest thought is to miss where the Hobbit was imagined: To imagine where an idea began is to imagine how my camera needs to capture the past in our futures:

I could never imagine to miss a natural fall from grace: I could never imagine how my camera would atone for missing anything: Our heart sees through our eyes: Our eyes see through through our heart:

Berlin Holocaust Memorial: Architect Peter Eisenman

My eyes have not traveled one million miles to miss a thing of anything: I began by listening to the surface: I Passengered along California’s highway 395 mid-section for years: Baseball bats and spikes into the dirt touched the gloves of pastimes: I was reminded of the internment concentration of Japanese: I only heard about the games as a child: I never arrived at Manzanar: I suffered not from being alive in 1943: I suffered that I never arrived to see: I never wanted to  suffer the loss of future blindness:

“Do you remember? She was one of those who would never admit that when an emotion was dead, the memory of the occasion was dead as well. He had to take her memories on trust, because she had always been a truthful woman.”

Graham Greene: A Burnt-Out Case

Our heart sees through our eyes: Our eyes see through through our heart: Memorials to past lives are dreams that tell stories unseen: To gallantly live among past deaths into their future is where tales begin: Our past is always our futures:

I was in The Illinois Holocaust Museum: I neared the The United States Holocaust Memorial in D.C

I stepped into the The Peter Eisenman Berlin Memorial: I gazed at the Martyrs’ Memorial in Bangladesh: I stood atop the Memorial to the Babi Yar Memorial in Kyiv: I stood afar from the Arlington Memorial Amphitheater: I touched the water of New York’s 9/11 Memorial:

I still suffer from blind eyes to the architecture of those said memorials: I reconvene with  the Japanese internment: I remember the sounds of lives not mine: I see the sounds of lives not mind: I drown in the sights and sounds that I have not witnessed:

My camera has never been a witness to murder and mayhem: Conflicts and errors of nations are heard: I have heard about the Hutu and Tutsi: I have read about the Bosnian War: One million conflicts in the Middle East: Almost ten thousand years of human turmoil: What remains is a mere evidence of a camera in panoramic mode: Centuries in a single frame across my decades are the constant: Planets’ eternity I always remember: Paul Celan’s Sand from the Urn comes to mind: I conjure what the fantasists do in my mind: It is what I do on my streets and beyond: Merlin resides where my dreams live: Our heart sees through our eyes: Our eyes see through through our heart: I want to make anything more beautiful: I may never achieve the overwhelming visual:

Illinois Holocaust Memorial: Architect Stanley Tigerman

Architecture of Cities: Marilyn Monroe Meets Bruno Mars

The Empire State Building

The if in a day profoundly appears: If I could sing Marilyn Monroe days Lazy:

The if in a day profoundly appears: If I could sing Bruno Mars The Lazy Song: Appearances seem the same: The odes to what they become: Then I could imagine I see everything imaginable: The ode to what if becomes:

What if my day was shoulder to shoulder with Ernest Hemingway: What if The Green Hills of Africa could be mine: What if his template for the vernacular became my photographs: What if my habits became that may be: What if everyday was a conquest:

The great divides: The great migrations: We delineate our lives to exist before and to follow afar: The great arboretum ahead lives:

If you might stand in the center of Dhaka: if you might see ten million Bangladeshis: If you might hear the the din: If you might see the clamoring: If you knew how to scream sans a single sound: What might you hear among: What if you are alone: the silence is a pause: The pause is only to hear your capture:

Homage to Berenice Abbot: My Twenty-First -Century: October,2024

Mozart’s Requiem in “D…”is heard: The “…Requiem incomplete: The Caesura is seen: The maestro alone: The poetic pause is not slight: It is where my careers’ eyes espy my challenges: It is where my arboretum is seen: It stands as if seventeen-thousand pipes from St Stephens Organ poses before you: Ready to song, ready to sing: Something afresh leads: The capture of necessity may be near: A conquest is never to be: The single arboreta is akin to celebrated oceanic currents on display: Too hard to navigate: The moment may be my camera’s caesura, if I am to force forward:

Francis Ford Coppola’s audacity we witness: An entire cinematic universe enters one man’s inner sanctum: Melding into a plethora of pastoral gazes: Realities and fantasies become one: Coppola’s merlinesque dream of possibilities unfolds: The director’s stew melds my mind with newfound possibilities: The dream becomes: We become the present, past and future:

Hudson Yards New York City

Coppola imagines a wreath in waiting: The camera paces as in mindful: Captivated by our dreams: Renaissance imaginations invite our eyes to equally embrace the unimaginable  Da Vinci/Fra Angelico: They forever art anew: Like a carta da lucido (vellum) atop millenniums of dreams breathes: Their eyes became us: We became: Coppola leads us to The Godfather’s (Marlon Brandos) brow: The brow becomes: The window recedes from view: A seemingly secret dream appears: Natures’ natural appears: The intersection of imagination and heart speak before what may be captured: Something fades: Something comes into view: My camera engages the near: The  arboreta becomes: Reality careens in every direction:For decades my eyes have been substituting realities for dreams: Dreams for realities The planets arboretums all alone stand: The great walls of architecture have been waiting: Intersections have been dreams manifested: Captures step beyond the dreams:The photography reminds of Einstein’s insanity that wasn’t: The appearance of heroes come to the forefront: Carleton Watkins stands: Felice Beato journeys: Mathew Brady engages: Thousands who influenced before appear: They dreamed: I communed.Halcyon days spoke to me: The past revealed: I have only attempted to what I have failed: I meant to sustain feelings to remain: The light of day moves: Raptors descend to devour: They “prey”:Empathy in art arises: The happiest days dance between the trees: Rising steel and glass are my captures: Architecture comes to surprise: Tomorrow may seem logical: Memories are obscuring my tomorrows: Ode to pine for halcyon days:

My Dreams about Architectural Design

Architecture of Cities: The Peripheral Journey

A melding of two designs in London

My eyes mostly see creatures from nature naked: Sometimes I might hear the entire whale roar: Sometimes the alligator bits will squeal: Sometimes the pink elephant will urinate like a blue rhinoceros: My memory will always be lost before it is gained. My moments are meant to be before I can no longer see:

Everyday I see my imagination: The beautiful and the broken awaken: Fantasies and fewer truths arise: Everyday I make a capture: Everyday I see the architecture I might photograph.

The idea of pockmarked boulevards upon my eyes: The idea of vanishing highways alone upon my eyes: The idea of my eyes alone among the black blackened chiaroscuro alleys: I will be allowed to see: The idea of a vacated invisible intersection: I will be allowed to see: The imaginary loss is real: The real is all I might one day see:

Artist Jaume Plensa: Madison Square Park NYC

The lost but never intended intersections are before my eyes: I land before I take off: I was never flying but I arrive at the unintended destination: A misguided step reveals what direction I head towards: Lost Horizon’s Shangri-La, if you allow, is real. The Man Who Would be King, if you allow, is real. Wherever I choose to imagine captures become real.

The history after me begins in 1904: I burst: I exclaimed: I imagined: Jack Kerouac almost five decades following roared across Route 66 in directions to be: He lived across roads destinations: He collected the imaginations to dream: 

I glimpsed by chance before and after, Canyon De Chelly, (Edward Curtis’s Monument Valley) became: The day I imagined how my past would amount a takeover of my future: My original dream: Collecting the entire human history in a single thirty-five mm frame: Francis-Ford-Coppola recognized his seventy-mm influences days and years before mine: Like me, he saw words and stories that made his dreams a bit possible:

Edward Curtis’ portrait awakened my eyes to the unintended dreams: Beyond the vantage point: Beyond what might be ahead there is a history that was: We marched: 

I know Twain’s Huckleberry Finn: I know Coppola’s Apocalypse Now: I know John Huston’s Sierra Madre: I know Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms: Calvino’s Italy to Kublai Khan’s China…Dali’s Costa Brava to Miro’s Costa Sol…Tsarist Russia to what now may be…

Los Angeles Train Station

Before it comes to an end, Utagawa Hiroshige’s wave waivers as it stands before me: My destinations are paramount towards my end: The destinations are mere steps to where I might need to be: If I don’t get to the intended was: The peripheral journey is:  

I gather stories: Stories are told to me: I arrive: I might see J.M.W. Turner’s ethereal likeness of an ancient kingdom, ancient city on his  Approach to Venice canvas: I may instead see brick and mortar of Anselm Kiefer’s Athanor:  I dream of destinations as one might imagine art: Newly dreamed destinations may arrive like captures on the universe’s playground of stories to be told: 

Ahead as I dream are captures of imaginary possibilities: A witches brew may be best:

I approach the new with trepidation and gusto: I am always concerned what may continue: Rudyard Kipling comes to mind: His dreams and fantasy’s are mine: He writes true stories that are fiction: Films are made from his memories: His The Light that Failed could be true: My adrenalin drives: My eyes can no longer dream side by side: My dreams: The future/past that follows each capture.

Ruby Tuesday:

“When you change with every new day

Still, I’m gonna miss you”.

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards

Architect: Group A: “Blaak 8” Rotterdam

Architecture in Cities: The Melding Dreams of Film

The Chrysler Building

The Queen of the Night bloomed. It was akin to the queen bee mating naked amid a sanctuary of hives: So many dreams remain, if you wish:

Godzilla comes to mind often: The dinosaur scoured the Tokyo metropolis: Horrified, the child’s eyes remained riveted to the screen: Laughter might seem insolent, but the story is true: Celluloid moments is where we see our lives and our minds: Apocalyptical narratives dance just within my mind: Humanity survived: Tokyo remains: Memories are overlaid like The Blob with Steve McQueen in mind.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter House Five scared the hell out of me: Dresden was: My father was a prisoner too: Billy Pilgrim had nightmares too: Films rekindle: Films address the future and past: Films are not real but true. The big screen marries our dreams to our nightmares:

My minds travel the globe: I don’t know what I am looking for until I arrive: Godzilla brought me to Tokyo: Kurt Vonnegut brought me to Dresden: Jan Komasa storied the Warsaw uprising: Hundreds and thousands died in my horrors: The built environment’s history was razed to nothingness: History and time allow the stories to continue:

There is nothing to be callous about: Cinema is mythical and true: It tells the truths about lives lived, environments built and terminated: Films tell us myths about lives and cities that once breathed as one: No longer are films myth: They are as poets suggest, our truths.

The New Museum: Architects SANAA

I dreamed about making films with a cast of one hundred and one thousand: I am still trying: I merely understand one lens and one camera: I make one frame a day or more: Two hours of celluloid leaves me breathless: My camera still frames a single moment: My world is not the big screen: The big screen is where I dream: The single lens is where I live.

I have loved the danger of our imaginations since I was “so small”. The connections I have discovered between movies and the built environment make me feel: I see how my dreams might live on screen: I see how on the big screen I am the adventurer that knows no boundaries: I see how my life is laid bare in the history I imagine: The movies I imagined:

2001 Space Odyssey triggered dreams I had not yet experienced: The universe and its appending galaxies are there to be explored: We as in “I” will discover lives not known: I am reminded of cities not yet explored: Lawrence of Arabia never defined cities and built environments: The movie is there as if part of galaxies: To be traveled and explored: New minds new lands: I am for a few seconds Peter O’Toole: Wim Wenders’ Paris,Texas expands the known universe before our eyes: I am Harry Dean…: Days of Heaven and Red Desert offer more glimpses into other galaxies: Fellini is always a member of the myths: He invites us to take a walk through post war Rome: The Nights of Cabiria entangles my mind with past memories of Warsaw, Dresden and Tokyo: Like them Fellini’s Rome was to be rebuilt:

Dormitory for the General Theological Seminary: Presently The High Line Hotel NYC

I celebrate the universes that have vanished in real life but remain in myth: What was there, what will be. I mourn the loss of the world before my arrival:

Film is where something more can be: I am at night, a passenger in others dreams: I draw lines from the deserts to cities, ponds to oceans: I see New York and Paris as I would the farmland to the mountains: If given a chance for a few seconds I may be the Fountainhead’s Howard Roark, Blade Runner’s Rick Deckard: I may drop into Metropolis or Spartacus: Day of the Locusts or Wizard of Oz:

Where my camera travels film has lived before:

I find myths and dreams on the biggest of screens home to my imaginations: I might find the happiest of times with the animated Closed Mondays” or “Steamboat Willie”:

If I were to start from the beginning I may imagine that I am tentatively beginning my visual quest with Victor Moore and Beulah Bondi: They saw the wonder of the big and small in Make Way for Tomorrow: Where the gang from the Wizard of Oz came to Emerald City with eyes wide open, Victor and Beulah came to New York with a little bit of the end in a new beginning:

A menagerie of Architecture on 42nd street NYC

Architecture in Cities: Tales of Cities

Architect Dominique Perrault: Nantes, France: Client APLIX

We dance: I imagine a pitter-patter: The wolf or a pack come running: Their nails clickety-clickety atop the wooden floors of an empty corridor:

We dance: The bear winds its way down the corridor: it stops to lick your face: The meal soon to be entertained:

We dance: The bright lava orange eyes near: The Uhu (Eurasian Eagle Owl) lands: Quietly the corridor echos the talon’s concerto of clickety-clickety: The prancing and pitter-patter disappears into the skies:

Memories begin when the eyes  dream: Cities, countries and continents pass through time: True tales begin:

Heaney, Seamus: “Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces”

…“Come fly with me,

come sniff the wind

with the expertise

of the Vikings--“

I imagine: My eyes encapsulate the details with the loudest conversations.

I imagine I illustrate the dreams that come from words:

I imagine: I am never in a city lonely not alone:

I have many times landed in cities before today as if a friend awaited: An author who I might have known share his/her sights and unimaginable sounds: I began to explore the physical worlds of the written word: 

Most sources of fables and tales that have never been true or were they: What depends is what my camera thinks it sees: Truth is: The world you were meant to see: 

I have realized I must walk in the footsteps of the language masterful: The language of others is not a mere adventure but a journey with the eyes of billions:

Architect Christian de Portzamparc : LVMH Tower NYC

The pace and ideas authors share are about nurturing your personal lenses: Once you learn to see what the intended story may be, you have arrived: So I follow.

I imagine: Yukio Mishima’s demise happened in Shinjuku: If he might have taken my hand on the walk to Ichigaya Barracks: If there was an if: I walked with him as if I was his companion: What picture might the photographer Eikoh Hosoe ( who recently passed) have captured: Soldiers gathered: The streets exploded in turmoil: I remember Yukio Mishima felt he was Japan: I was there.

I imagined I was in St Petersburg: Cold and afraid: I stood aside the Neva River:  I narrowed my eyes: Dostoevsky’s dark, dampened home beckoned: The greatest of the Brothers Kalamazov was inside me: I suffered from his sufferings: My camera captured the lament:

I imagined the two ears of Toni Morrison: She listened to Harlem in a rhythm that was part jazz part Jacob Lawrence: James Baldwin held her hand: Jazz history was having a Harlem moment:

My camera saw its past and present: The jazz was Morrison’s: Jacob Lawrence perched above her like Cicero in Roman times: Pastels ablaze, colors unimaginable: The four of us walked: I listened with my eyes: They had a bit of pitter-patter:

I imagined Joan Didion discovering the inculpatory evidence that Manson’s mayhem may have been more than we could see: We both felt our eyes absorb the quiet streets the narrow paths the screams embedded on the stones of 10050 Cielo  Drive in Benedict Canyon, Los Angeles:

Architect: Moshe Sadie U.S Institute of Peace

The north of us is where we nightmarishly imagined Mansion: A Jack Nicholson like cackle roared : The words from another felt like in an overdrive: My camera captured what it dreamed: Sharon Tate so beautiful, Charles Manson maniacal: My imagination captured the moment. 

I Imagined: The shape shifting Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem:  Surreal Science Fiction filled the pages: His admiration for Tolstoy made my eyes see as I have always: We don’t live in a three dimensional world: We walk in one: Cixin Liu’s future world live in his present married to his past: Married to our past: Schulman, Liu and Tolstoy: We weave our steps together: My camera dreams with them: It captures the live Surrealism: How else can the camera explore a city without a mingling of fables past and a fables future to offer insight into worlds the camera must capture:

I envied Colm Tobin’s walk with Thomas Mann: I wanted to meet the Magician: I would have loved to  reinvent a semi autobiographical story that resonated with my lens: I wanted to mingle with Mann in Los Angeles: I wanted to walked with his Germans in the coastal Palisades as he did in this Berlin: If I could hold their hands and walk what might I see of their past and present Hitler: The camera wanted a capture:

How does one not morph into A Tale of Two Cities: Was I: Could I: I wanted to be a participant as I wanted to be be a part of every sited English street in Dickens literature: There are only so many opportunities to meld with the times: There are actually no opportunities unless you bring your book straight to the eyes and read about where my camera should tag along with the eyes of geniuses:

I imagine: Federico Garcia Lorca stood intellectually naked when he arrived in New York City: He was a poet dislodged  from his known reality: Can you gleam into his eyes what he saw: When he saw: He looked up at Metropolis mannered skyscrapers for the first time: Looking up has always been some sort of symbolism for my own eyesight: To imagine a moment of two people dreaming together: Dreaming to touch a fantasy: The fantasy was to be the future of our cities of architecture: Fables of cities to become realities:

I imagine dying with a dream in hand: Stefan Zweig’s Royal Game was a part of how I see my visual landscape: The game of chess applies to so many dialogues and philosophies: I felt my camera should have been in Brazil’s Petrópolis: I could not have saved the man and his wife: His words from past stories obliged me to consider the what ifs: Enough of his life I have stepped into among the Viennese and more: The camera has felt emboldened walking and espying the language of a master: All journeys should be as welcoming.

Architect: David Adjaye: Smithsonian National Museum of African American History

Architecture in Cities: Traveling for it

Train from New York to Boston

Illicit dreams beamed brightly:

Port of Jackson sharks smiled gently: 

Some feared their smiles:

A child imagined an auto’s bonnet, a glistening grill:

The conical teeth ground and grinned: Brutality graced beauty, brutality it became:

The real and unfamiliar lived in fresh flesh:  

Port of call came to mind: The voyage reminded me of Coleridge: “… Ancient Mariner” interplay could be heard then and now: The life among the seas might be me:

Renzo Piano London’s Central Saint Giles

Traveled and engaged I prefer the strength abound in industrial transport: Traveling has become a story that fades from my past and holds some truths for what is near to be: I dream:

My city block may be an entire nation:

I extend my lens from continent to continent: May that be a city block: Is that a nation:

Torrent rivers calm as a summer day may be another block another city: Is that a nation:

Mountain ranges in between separate where we have been what may become:

If I could remember: What am I to remember, if I might remember.

A funny thing about living in between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: How do you choose to not live and see anew: My  camera  dreams ahead for me: It sees what may be my reality: My camera sees the reality of others: Oscar Niemeyer, Zaha Hadid, Ma Yansong dream beyond our known brick and mortar: I begin to imagine a bit more:

I imagine the comforts living between the amorphous and the crystalline: I imagine journeys  aside the straight line: The direction is neither a perfect line nor the impossible  absolute: I yearn to discover the undeniable: Too many variables live in our tomorrows to know what may be:

Wilkinson Eyre London Cable Car ( Emirates Air Line)

I am traveling between continents without complete knowledge of what will be:

The Concorde of yore flew atop the skies: The air balloon floated into unfathomable beauty:

The ground is my home: My metropolises are of unknown and not yet experienced: My imaginations  devour what industrial strength  transportations might be: The rumble feels me, feels my angst: I feel the rumble: The quantum leaps along history’s trails are my psychological ebb and flow: I am alone: Societies’ nations of generations might feel my same: Mankind comes to life because history unfolds like multiple avalanches of Chinese/Japanese scrolls: Native American burials and discoveries of untold fictions and non fictions rumble below: History of our past and future is where my mind lives like a frequent dreamer among passengers: One million Morpho butterflies ruminate about next: Theyappear like Freud puzzles in various  analytical stages of sanity:

My favorite photograph is not a beauty: My favorite photograph, The Queen’s Target:

It is not brilliant: It is what has been left behind: Roger Fenton did not make art, he made history:

He left a staggering pose of a moment past: I have spent a lifetime looking for a target with my own bull’s eye attached: It is out there: It is my  “A raison…” seems appropriate:

My sensory perceptions are triggered like fireflies alighting in heroinism: the slow dance of lights and movement never dance but absorb :The rush of the light streams take hold and fade to never: There is nothingness until you dream:

I embark on a dream of slow moving realities that speed faster than I will know: Names become never commonplace but touchstones: My senses are alighted with the captures: China, Russia and fifty countries are storied environments: Niemeyer, Gehry, Hadid, Miro and Noguchi are  enlightenments fermented beyond my own expiration dates:

Every place I visit along the earths’ path are not mere steps: Imagine a chess boards sixteen pawns: Imagine the sixteen multiplied by seven billion: Imagine how I can see them all before my captures are no more: Three hundred years of celluloid is what I see in my mirror: Tomorrow is merely a guess.

Rafael Vinoly’ London 20 Fenchurch Street (The Walkie-Talkie)

Architecture in Cities: Cities Interior Dreams

New York Public Library

I find a human bone: I imagine a skeletal remain: My picture might begin: History stops time: My history makes the time I live in: Every picture is meant to see the snap that lives beyond today: I marry most natural sciences into a single engagement: I examine what poses before me: Generational experiences accompany my photography: My imaginations have value: I am learning to see: I need to  explore moments: What becomes our history will be a mystery.

I imagine real time in faux speed: Imagine the Las Vegas Sphere: Imagine a single switch can stop time: A planetarium’s eyes site warp speeds on infinite galaxies: Imagine: Oh, to be a snail in fluids  of consciousness streams:

I am pillowed in the shell of a snail: I move as if I am running: I am almost never running: My interior mind glossed in the riches of mother-of-pearl pools: It is an oasis where I can hide in plain sight: I attempt to examine the beauty that are my captures to be: My mind is in a hurry to be somewhere: My mind slows as in a snails shell to see: The beauty and rapture I capture are frozen moments captured in reflection: Comforted and glowing my mind awaits:

St. Nicholas National Shrine; Architect Santiago Calatrava New York City

I understand sanctuaries are not safe: We as in “all of us” cannot live in a cocoon where silence lives: Cameras need to explore beyond the comfort zones: 

What would I do if a unique union of legions’ legends of Roman Praetorian Guards arrived before I successfully explored: I may have  missed all that has been built: The built environment has to be seen if it is offered: A real world of fantasy might await: My mind’s home becomes an architectural investigation: It is where I seem to live: Legions of Praetorian Guards approach.

A panoramic view of my visual world awaits: I am at a snails pace: I near my private glory.

I may be Kafka’s Gregor in Metamorphosis: In plain sight I am seen and I see: A snail is merely a snail that not a soul sees: My visual luxuries become mine: I am alone with a view to be seen: My own orb, is a gloss of an interior snails’ shell: A home with a  secret way of seeing:

Inside Heron Tower by KPF gazing at Norman Foster’s 30 St Mary Axe ( The Gherkin) in London

Interiors are mere shells of worlds we don’t see: They are our mother-of-pearls in some dreams: I see not with a pair of eyes: I see with recognition: I am never certain, what may be, what may become if you allow: The interiors of architecture are rarely acknowledged. I need to claim them for my cameras:

Towards my end I may sit as Kafka’s Gregor: My time will pass from view:  Most built designs might vanish as well: I remind my life: I am alone:  My eyes are confined in a dream: The dream may be real: My eyes espy millimeters: I make pictures that are almost pure: My mind may be sage: The sage for how life lives in the three tenses of time: The passages of time:

I am like most people: I live between what might be and what will be:

I am not Tennyson nor Ulysses: But I as a snail pillowed in confines such as iridescent lush of mother-of-pearl, I “…strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”. 

I often recall my conversations I have with my eyes: It is never lonely: It is why so many decades moving forward I am rewarded with each capture: I hear the voices that structure my steps and my cameras’ settings: If I am to imagine what my past had been: I may imagine what my future may be: Is there a better way than through my twenty-millimeter-my forty-five-millimeter?

Nothing is better focused than a dream through a lens.

Snohetta inhabiting Philip Johnson in AT&T Building New York City

Architecture in Cities: Monuments and Memorials: Histories and Memories

Bangladesh: National Martyr’s Memorial: Designed by Syed Mainul Hossain

The entire planet is insignificant until we are not: The infinite worlds above we cannot count: We are small: All that resides above us is an infinite collection: Worlds never to be known, never to be known: Nothing is infinite below us: It is us: I celebrate the lives before my yesterday:

The imagined bend in the river mingles with Naipul’s  A Bend in the River : The often considered narrative story and the imagined vanishing point lives in lives past and about: Its brilliance is brilliant: The closer we get to a reality the more we dream about what is beyond the bend:

The imagination may subjectively be about bending facts about fictions: The real vanishes as we move close and afar: The impossible becomes possible: Something becomes:

Journeys are often about what may be discovered: The dream of what may be discovered: The corners of the global planet are waiting:

Monuments and memorials are arguably about fractions: The fractions of our history’s population: The fractions of lives lost: mourned: celebrated:

A detail of; Harriet Feigenbaum’s “ Indifference to Injustice…Is the Gate to Hell : A reference to Auschwitz Partially liberated by the Ukrainian army

This sculpture is in Madison Park NYC on the Appellate Division Courthouse

Wim Wenders Wings of Desire approaches the separation between those who are us and those who are our past: Every which way you look at it; we are us:

We often lament what was once: We desire to have one more word: We have lost something someone from our past: We merely desire to meet again with: We have stories that are incomplete: We reach to lives past merely to touch: Touch their voices: We have heard the last words: We lend that story to those around us: Then there is the future’s share of this past: What monuments and memorials may be to some: 

The death of the past is so much more interesting in hindsight: It offers us a key: That key allows us to unlock a sophisticated interlacing of our emotions entwined with man’s history and our own: An immersion of words and worlds; Emotions are linked to a woven weave of yesterday, tomorrow and today:

Lafayette Cemetery in New Orleans. La

We entertain to visit monuments and memorials for numerous purposes: The purpose is central to “I”: Certainly we visit the dead: Certainly we speak to our histories: Certainly we may imagine: Certainly there is that moment: Certainly we hear the worst of our lament: Our sorrows are “us”: 

I disappear to another capture: I often inadvertently visit the dead: The stone and earth you remember become my camera’s capture:

The many memorials and monuments are legacies to the revolutions of time: A record of life in frames: My camera allows me to expose the hidden discretions equally: I think with what my eyes might hear:

I remember ferrying across: Paris, Moscow, Kyiv, Berlin, Istanbul, Bangladesh, New Orleans, another fifty states, cities and various continents: Memories distort reality: Reality is mostly distorted:

I have never seen atrocities: I have seen notorious burial grounds: I have seen forgotten burial grounds: There upright somewhere in our minds are monuments and memorials to things we have seen, things we have dreamed: For something better and worse there is always more to remember.

There was a tectonic shake the night my grandfather was buried: The entire family laughed: Some joked that my grandfather, Lou, bellowed, ”tell me it ain’t true”. It was a certain end to a life lived.

I am neither an excavator or exhumer: I am neither an historian or anthropologist:

My camera merely allows me to see what might be a dig, a discovery or an invention:

The stories or less that I see are always present: Looking for a truth buried when it rises right below your eyes is what movies and novels are made from: The most exacting truth for me are my hours sitting alongside monuments of memorials, memorials monumental reliving lives that are not mine: 

I know my history: I know how genuine the atrocities by demons before us have lived: I will never knowingly live in that arena: 

The globe for me is too large to see in my lifetime: I carry with me from city to city memories of things: Chaos and more that I have imagined: Someone’s past, living or dead is a peek into history’s human behavior.

If you will consider that I have stood in front of ten thousand built environments: Then allow yourself to imagine how the minutes become hours; the hours become days; the days become years; my life becomes: My photography may only be beginning.

Robert E. Lee Monument: New Orleans, La (removed)

Architecture in Cities: A Point of View:

Thomas Heatherwick “The Vessel” Hudson Yards, New York City

I discovered the abyss from a perch above my precipice:

I have been perpetually sucked through voids of non pixilated color chromed fine grained embedded images: A lifetime of visual worlds not mine; But mine.

Rollercoasting in my interior-landscape: A former child’s toy chest: Vintage zoetropes providing the illusions of truth and dreams: Dreams in my colorful phantasm world I call my photography:

I fanatically decide what my subconscious sees: Might my moments suit my cameras; my lives past and ahead:

When I pass to my below or above I will have arrived at my lone own empyrean: A place where I can imagine every capture I have dreamed for:

I have stood alone with those at sea: Their ends might be known: They dreamed:

London: Architects Vino;y and Foster and more

Alone with discoverers I stood: Those who have seen what I know: They have seen where I have been: I have seen what I have dreamed: I know what is meant to be in a frame: My passion is about living in a cameras’ eye:

I am like seven billion others: I may not know them: I am like seven billion others who leave their homes every day: I live in their minds: They live in mine: I must consider every option: Their days are mine: All of my frames are steps to be made: I never make a photograph alone:

The self can be wickedly enlightening: I imagine I have learned how to see: I imagine the conversations with my other selves: There are voices that I may nod to: There are voices who just  may be me:

One day more than four decades ago I happened upon the corners of four cities: I began with a photograph: I imagined blanketing entire cities with shutter-stops and single lens reflex:

I stood with the heroes of my time: The repetition of craft can be inspiring:

Casper David Friedrich posed boldly: The “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is not me: It is a mere place where I can dream alone: It might be a place where I can stand and see: The metaphors are almost reality: The voices of so many bring solace to my eyes above a precipice: My camera poses like Casper for the moment:

New York: Past and future

Most days I embark on not a journey but a suspension of disbelief: I stand where I can see south and north as one: Fifth Avenue beyond the Gilded Age: There is north: From somewhere on Forty-Second Street between Fifth Avenue and just shy of Madison Avenue the lens extends to possibly a Vanderbilt’s mansion: If the extension is south, it may be to a life among Rockefellers: Evolution of a city’s life continues to pace my lens past modernity until this very moment: Between what may you have seen and what may become like a commuter I embark and disembark: My daily visit with architecture lives: Built environments present themselves ahead and behind:

The one single moment in the one day among all of everything: I extend the known histories: Beyond possibly something London: Roads Portobello, Oxford, Carnaby, Piccadilly or something: Something beyond Paris: Baron Haussmann eyes the life before the Tower Eiffel: 

Beyond something Los Angeles: The hybrid city is home to boulevards, streets, deserts and valleys: A metropolis with a modern search for identity:

Metropolis’s in twenty-four hours or a lifetime invite me back to empyrean vantage points where visual dreams are realized: I venture out to discover what others have shared and what I can see:

I track my eyes: I have an affinity for something: Something dazzling: Something mosaic: Something afar: Something iconic.

Change in cities, countries and continents isa constant: My camera can merely hold on to what might be the truth today: The evolution of cities seems through my lens to rotate and evolve faster than the planets axis rotation: I may only capture  hours not seen by my seven billion: the moments are mere captures maybe never seen: My simple truth is the  presence of architecture on my camera’s framed capture: My past is a constant melding with the present and future: The  built environment presents itself like a strategic battleground: I cannot achieve all that I desire: My life filming our world is a puzzle living in a mixed bag of truths.

My very first photograph in Paris perched above the abyss on my precipice

Architecture in Cities: Paris and More

Christian de Portzamparc Architect: Cité de la musique Paris

Kipling’s If is heard loudly: Moments become encouragements: I play endlessly with more:

I cannot remember when I became a photographer: I merely remember speaking photography:

The history of photography may be begins in France: Paris at one time was the heart of all dreams sometimes seen and always heard: Photography’s romance transforms not a generation but in some form mankind’s reflection of ourselves: France is what I remember most: My camera romanced the pictures that would become: Paris romanced my eyes:

I am an army of one and millions when it comes to Mile Davis devotees: Sometimes I am an army of one when it comes to Dingo: The soundtrack plays to the pleasures of my life lived like no other: The story begins “down under” and concludes in Paris: If all cultural adventures ended in Paris how bad might that be: Dingo has become a type of epicenter, a quake that informs my photography: Like the photographer Saul Leiter said: “I don’t have a philosophy, I have a camera”: Dingo is a visual offering: The sounds perform for so many frames:

The beginning of something may be beginning of everything: The common meeting of minds for pleasures is what Paris was: I am not writing a history of a cultural world: It is merely an imagined fact: All minds interested went to Paris to breathe:

Jean Nouvel Architect: The Musée du Quai Brandy-Jacques Chirac: Paris

My camera’s thoughts always return to Walter Benjamin’s “Arcades”: The long ago razed arcades were homes to history’s busts of Caesar, Napoleon and Homer: The memories danced like children between kiosks: Eyes peered into reflections of my past and yours: Prisms of light played hide and seek among mirrored interiors: They became windows into how I might see me: My memories of a past I had never seen were living alone in the Arcades: The past is always near: What secrets there might be for our futures:

Remembered histories are what Benjamin shared: The histories that including this very day stand before me in every frame I have ever seen: Death, life, dreams and nightmares of centuries past: This is home to my cameras:

Miles Davis played sounds that invoked Ravel, Rachmaninoff and more: Never to compare the simplicity of what I do to the genius of Miles Davis: My eyes see history in a small way that Miles heard history in his sounds: My eyes never captured what Miles heard: He heard melodies and chords of cityscapes and endless seas and continents: I have only heard the pictures of Charles Marville, Atget, Lartigue, to name the minutest among my countless heroes from three centuries of photography:

Frank Gehry Architect: Interior detail: Fondation Louis Vuitton

I stand alone not watching the frivolity that may be Dingo: I stand alone to hear history in my mind: I merely need to discover away to record a world of history in a single frame: The passage of time illuminates and elicits the bit of insanity where all of my truths live:  The goal  is ahead: Everything that has past before me before I pass my dreams by:

My privilege to dream about my forever lives is an unsustainable dream: I carefully choose my music the way one would in a military march: The ancients pose with weapons drawn:  A celebration of unity: Miles and me is not a bad way to dream about being aware: The song captures: My camera’s pace immersed into a soundtrack that only I can here: The birth of photography: The aftermath of every image as if at battle with myself: The need to conquer each moment: My camera lurches forward: Paris could be mine like it may have been for the ancients: The cycle recycles like a montage of all of the footsteps prior to mine: All of the histories lost in the arcades and in my mind: The privilege of beginning again: Benjamin is gone: Miles is gone: The music plays: I am here: Snippety-snap-snap.

Frank Gehry Architect: Fondation Louis Vuitton Detail Paris

Architecture of Cities: New and Old Voices

The Flatiron Building New York City: Architect Daniel Burnham

The other day I heard one of my cats cry out: I turned every which way to see both my boys:

They were gone: They had been missing in action for two and more years ago:

I often heard their voices as they scampered along: The wooden floors occasionally sounded like black and white ivories in the keys of life: The two boys always scampered: Their voices intermingled with mine: They are mine: 

Inspiring as it is concerning: Sanity is overrated: Insanity is home to a bit more volume of clarity: 

I merely had a few more things to say to them: They didn’t go into an afterlife: They merely live on in new light: My moments remind me of Max and Dash: Voices matter.

A photographer’s life is; can be a force of nature: Nothing replaces nature’s power in a career:

My eyes share the veritable truths in my genre. My cameras live in a bit of existentialism:

Dreams about reality mostly:

LAX: Los Angeles Airport: Architect Pereira and Luckman: Paul Williams and Welton Becket

There is always something dark about seeing the light ahead: It speaks to your angle of repose: The need to move forward: The urgency to capture many moments in various guises of light: My camera is only rewarded when my eyes secure the better imageries.

I have landed on lands far and near: My agenda is always to merely witness my architectural history, and remember my footprints: What stands: What was. What is coming: I arrive in familiar and foreign lands as explorers do: 

A point of reference allows me to navigate my affinity for the symbolic nature of the four cardinal directions: We may be entwined with the mythology of the east’s blue dragon, the white tiger of the west, the red bird of the south or the dark entwined snake and tortoise of the north: Nothing sane matters because symbolism is what you borrow from it: The four cardinal directions may become dreams, energies and the coalescence of everything we hope to know to be truth and myth:

Madison Square Park: Architects tower left: Kohn Pedersen and Fox: Tower Right: Cetra Ruddy

I have imagined Hannibal, Caesar, Napoleon and the artist Brancusi: All figures entered metropolis’s like mountainous clouds of power: All spearheaded towards a symbolic North Star: A destination to guide their ambitions: They placed their ear to the ground: vibrations of cities rumbled before them: Something to behold: A capture was ahead: They all needed in some measure a beacon: 

I, like my conquering adventurers enjoined the bearings ahead with my ambitions: I melded into a centrifugal force of animated holograms: My eyes, my galaxies, we marched: It is more city than country: More country than continent: More memories of dreams than realities:

The awe inspired, point to Van Allen’s Chrysler Building: The awe inspired, point to Louis Kahn’s National Assembly in Bangladesh: The awe inspired, point to India’s Taj Mhal: The awe inspired, point to Paris’ Norte Dame: Collectively the traveler through the modern and ancients avow that they have arrived: They step into New York, Dhaka, Agra and Paris: Monuments live in cities: Countries and continents: You breathe: The pleasures and adventures that await your eyes: The voices echo: Find your beacon and begin.

Voices vanish before we have fully heard: Our eyes suffer: The voices share: We may fully articulate what we see: Those voices: The evidence of life lived before: The life we need: We explore the intricacies of our histories: 

Architecture is where the voices reside most acutely: Imagine: Brunelleschi might explain the steps to his Florentine Duomo: Imagine: Antoni Guadi might have shared the complexities of the Basilica de la Sagrada Familia church: Imagine:

Vanishing voices are the three dozen pritzker laureates before I met their accomplishments: Long before the numbers and the names my eyes floated like Tritons’: We engulfed the seven seas: History’s voices implored: Find your voice: Your voice will reign over your frames: Your photography voice will rise: 

There will always be a new horizon: There will always be the built history: Until there isn’t: There will always be the voices that navigate the four cardinal directions: New myths will arise: New symbolism will be: My frames in cities, countries and continents will live for a bit:

Then there are my voices: My boys/cats.

Architect Rafael Viñoly: 277 Fifth Avenue

Architecture of Cities: Julius Shulman and the Light of My Moon

Oscar Niemeyer in Los Angeles

If Scout was a boy: Would Harper Lee have named him “Scout”: Maybe Gregory Peck knew the answer: 

Scout’s inquisitive is mine: We merely share similar symbiotic curious curiosities:  A history of curiosities have become truth seekers reality; Adventurer’s dreams: Everyone who sought the secrets that behold more are mine: I have made curiosities for days and decades: The  cameras’ frames  have become my curiosities:

The camera’s voice(s) I listen to are those of others melded into my moments: There are no audio serenades: I am merely a passenger: The paths my lens espies are mine: I am a passengering  adventurer with no end in sight. 

I no longer remember where I sat when I saw Georges Méliès  A Trip to the Moon: 

Oscar Niemeyer in Paris

The moon is a place that my dreams travel to every day, every night: It has become my camera’s  life: I track my watch until it seems to appear: A camera does not wait because it is lucky:

A camera waits because there are only a few truths in the science of photography: The art in architecture:

Decades ago I emerged from the most excruciatingly deliciously pleasurable mentorship that a person would enjoy: I remember almost forty-five years ago:  I stood with the famous modernist photographer, Julius Shulman: I loaded the master’s eight by ten camera: The urban/rural mall waited: We waded in the heat’s heart for hours in the sun: He begged me to tell him what we were waiting for: My visual career was shaped by just one simple abstraction: Shulman never explained why we wait: He understood the delightful excruciating pleasures of the single capture:

He chortled for a few seconds: “Richard, shoot: Take the picture”: Today I know Shulman’s history explains why to wait, why we wait: My camera became a tool for my eyes: My camera sees before I do:

Oscar Niemeyer in Paris: The other light

I was once accused of being lucky at what I do: The circumstances of the shallow and narrow  minded architects’ lack of perception burned in me for seconds: How could my camera be lucky: I  subscribed to the urgency awaiting me: My lens was soon to freeze frame a moment: I waited for one more single capture: Days of storms filled the skies: Rain sent me to naked sheltering: Only a rainbow could save my days: The rainbow arrived: A dream became a reality: People cannot make sense of desires’ opportunities:

Luck is mankind’s religion. I remember: An Oscar Niemeyer temple of design awaited me in Los Angeles: I visited the clients home over several days: Their anxious voices wondered often: Often they wondered not what I may see: Their anxious minds wondered how I might see: I knew I had to capture more than Oscar had planned for: I had to capture enough: Some people know enough is when the camera can breathe: There is an entire exhale: The capture was near: 

I voiced passionately, I needed the moon: When the moon arrived It arrived almost full: My eyes became filled with Hubbles’ galaxies: The entire moment’s second was measured in the skies hallucinogenic patterns: 

I arrived for what only I needed to see: If Julius taught me one thing, he begged me to wait for the moon: I stood near to touch my George Méliès: My entire oeuvre is completely an adherent: I am a disciple to the light of moons:

The pictures that live in my memories may not fade yet: I still plead to remember when I first saw “A Trip to the Moon”: It underlines like some sort of historic fiction the histories of my moments: 

My eyes have claimed the history that my camera has seen: I merrily selfishly need to reasonably record my futures’ present, and the presents’ past: 

Days and years I have walked my cities: I remember my fellow travelers: The voices: The voices who have shaped my eyes: Everyday in truth and fiction voices remind me of my moon’s light:

I am neither a clever photographer nor a mere practitioner: I live within a known universe: I see all of the music that allows me to compose my time: My own moments.

Seville: Waiting for the light to expand for my camera

Architecture of Cities: Middle-Earth

#PeiCobbFreed Harry Cobb Architect #BankofChina #BryantPark

Middle-earth is home to mythologys’ truths:

Everything that you believe to be mythological is real.

Our world may begin with middle-earth: Volcanic surges aquifer floods:

Shards of glass propelled by steam elevating the nature of earth:

Earth bending shifts like tectonic plates afire:

Thirty-thousand feet below the known earth’s surface: There is more: The Kazumura Cave arises:

My eyes lift to witness the dance of the Sifaka: The Sifaka is not mythology: It rises to sounds possibly heard but never seen: It plays on my carousel of life’s pleasures:

There are no Tolkiens, Wells or Lewis’s in my world: No Sumerian, nor Celtic, nor Norse, nor Greek nor another mythological belief in my dreams: Here we are: I arrive at the intended:

I turn my back upon completion I think: I no longer wonder if the capture is made: I return to the dreams that are my truths:

Every dream begins with the begging for time: Not one for the origins of man, or something more outrageous to imagine: Something that might be built: When and where urban frontiers become our reality: Societies become our lives: My camera: It allows me to dream:

Architecture and Design #ArchitectureDesign

Where I may see time evolve: All of the good fortunes that I have been privy to began.

Myths of greatness in my land: Niemeyer, Hadid, Ando and:

The handshake from Oscar: The look of Zaha: The acquiescing Tadao: Imaginative ideas are manifested: My camera finds their offerings; Their ideas: I have my captures:

The beginning of time: The stopwatch signals how fast we need to move: We need  to keep up with the myth of truths: From middle-earth to Venetian islands:

There is a tremendous moment: Something is special. Nothing so amazing as peace:

There is a quietude after I have made the final snap: The one where I return to earth’s corner: Where I first realized that this was my moment:

That is why I equate my mine with Middle-Earth: So much noise and cacophonous knowledge:

Suddenly vanishing in a freeze frame: Then I begin again.

Tadao Ando Architect Pulitzer Foundation St Louis

I have never completely understood why I travel: Certainly I realized that the frontage that extends beyond my door and marries the city beyond is quite enough: Yet, landing on unforeseen adventures changes that: More is so much more: It may be why I link my own mythology with to be told phenomenons afoot: How many environments have I made into something more than yesterday: It has nothing to do with me nor camera: I merely dream that in my moments there is more than what poses before me.

The cities and rural roads I have traveled have never been about my affinity for Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Not tales of the “bardo” nor enigmatic primeval pictographs: I feel the ghosts of centuries past: That is enough: The photographs captured in real time are only a single frame: I am not returning to Rio, Dhaka, Dubai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Mexico City, Helsinki, Moscow nor anywhere else for another Sunset Boulevard “close-up”:

When I make a capture my day is done: Whether it be night or day: The side-view glance tomorrow is not yesterday: That is where my fear comes from: My camera dreams of conquering the 60th,125th or other speed fractions: That is the entirety of an experience no matter the age of pyramids or contemporary achievements:

I am challenged by the genius of others: I beg myself to espy more discoveries: My camera becomes in various guises of age: Something more.

Kengo Kuma Architect Yusuhara, Japan

Architecture of Cities: More Secrets

Los Angeles Public Library

A celluloid capture is a result of logging many hours: Consider the information your eyes gather in route: Two souls become: The iridescent deep blue whale gathers Krill-The pigmy marmoset evades the raptor:

Gusts of wind are heard: waves play off western cliffs: A universe floats above: The shadow of my marmoset dances: The stealth blue whale submarines ahead: 

I begin to direct my camera east: My eyes are clipped open like Clockwork Orange’s Alex: Do I hear Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or are my eyes attuned to something lilting softer:Joni’s Both Sides Now: Both are heard as if seen.

I know Los Angeles better than most: I know New York better than most: Most metropolises compel me to believe I am not in search, rather along for the ride: 

Eyes ahead, we look south we gaze north: I am in the company of one: I could be in the company of millions:

My mother’s history is not mine: I look around the past: I imagine living in the present: I seek a future to become: My car pulls the roads forth: Dreams are realized: A mere seconds along the blvd: I am cushioned among two living histories: My mothers’ past is gone: Her share as we pause to go forward: We melodically are passengering to a place I may be looking for.

Apple Store on Fifth Avenue

My dreams are always with eyes wide open: The fabulist in me mingles with the truth:  Stars like  satellites, real stars from the north illuminate the path: I am not chronicling every given moment along a blvd: This is a history of how cities seem in truth and fiction;

And the music plays.

My mother is today my guide to where families are from: The narrative like the navigation marry

as if one set of eyes are gangster like fast talking: The second set might pace voluminously like Lena Horne: Both sets are absorbing all as one history.

We were touring her first 20 odd years: All but two homes were captured: One might have been razed: The other was an apartment building that didn’t appeal to my sensibilities, but it was an image I should have snapped: 

Los Angeles sometimes feels like you are living like a sardine on a highway: Everywhere to go everything to see: A little night music a bit of light: Back roads and over passes: Decades and almost centuries to capture: I shout Capitol Records: It might have been Disneyland or Mt Kilimanjaro: For my mother the narrator of this drive it did not matter: 

Philip Johnson’s World’s Fair

Every home we passed was a landmark for conversational share: I would pull the car over: My mom would again query my interest in the history and stories: I would beg her to believe I was capturing a city: The story we made felt like a century of Scorsese and Coppola: D.W Griffith and John Ford: Cinematic storyboards became in my mother’s remembrances: Joan Didion’s murder and mayhem story from last week did not appear: Alas people were not murdering: families were sharing food and passionately appreciating getting ahead: 

I found myself making stories in my mind about a city’s century:  My mom continued: My mind continued photographing: My history melded with hers: I listened: My mother’s  broadcast from her past now saddles alongside my camera’s present:

The pigmy marmoset scampers, the giant blue whale espies like a submarine: Slow and worthy my mother’s history is revealed:

I bring her eyes to my New York:  Various elixirs celebrate the captures in two cities and one hundred cities:

My mother’s secrets certainly become mine: The capture of cities is illuminating in various guises:

Dreams with eyes wide open.

Finally we arrive at the furthest point east: In maybe ten-thousand words I might be able to share almost one-hundred and fifty years of urban rise: I park the car: I see what my mother saw of her shy century: I will as promised share the lasting century my camera has to reveal.

A dream of a view to a city: Los Angeles

Architecture of Cities: A Few Words From Joan Didion

Oscar Niemeyer: Rio Netori Art Museum

Joan Didion reminded me a few times: 

A few times our paths crossed: My portrait of John and Joan: Our origins: Our education: Our migration.

Oh, I have teamed up in some fashion with Homer, Shakespeare, Hemingway, Miller, Kerouac and others: I placed them deskside hidden and cushioned inside my cultural vaults: I rarely remember why I remember: I do feel more lucid when I need a dream about past literary influences: All of the words and volumes spin endlessly before my eyes: Have you ever seen electrolytes naked: 

There was something about Joan: She was decades ahead of me: Her mind seemed to ghost mine: Maybe truthfully I ghosted her mind: We did not talk/walk in the same circles: We (my imaginary self suggests) did walk where the other had been yesterday or tomorrow:

Herzog and de Neuron Laban Dance Center: London

Joan Didion recounted a story that she knew about: I tried to match her step by step: Joan’s ideas were more furtive than mine: A church’s congregation may exude “thank god”:

She recounted a nineteen-sixties murder: It had a particular stranglehold on my mind: It might be as the muscular flex an anaconda might dictate how I might breathe: Seconds or a few days of sensational power overcame me, my eyes:

Joan’s peace and mayhem story had in a very abstract way become a template for how I see: Her stories stilled my heart: Close encounters of haloes hovered: Haloed lights illuminated a city: Joan navigated: I followed her eyes not merely in Los Angeles but in a significant way, across a planet: 

The nineteen sixties murder was a very simple slash and decapitation assault:

Fashion Institute of New York{FIT}

The home was a corner lot with a freshly painted garden fence and proper garden that inferred an idyllic idealism habitation newly built Los Angeles future: The story wasn’t about an American housing moment: The story was about beyond the quiet was blood and death: Not a church mouse stirred: Not a single fallen leaf was heard: Death roamed on one side: My side was lily white and not a suspected stir from afar: Two sides lived: The clearly defined picture was almost Joni Mitchell’s  Both Sides Now: Maybe more acutely referred to as the famous Christmas Truce: The World War One truce where enemies became friends: Both side witnessed a story of war and peace: On either side of a story are two sides: I realize every new moment about architecture has sides to share and sides to dream about: Dreams to be told dreams to live.

Photography and photography’s history are always upon me: I capture imaginations: I capture the images and angles of dream: A Didion whisper is heard:

So many sides: Where might I begin: Another secret: Familiar and unfamiliar places have been hallmarks of my career: Names have become visual laboratories for my cameras: New places of anonymity rise and fall before every shutter is heard: Secret names, secret places rule my past and future. Possibilities live: I have arrived at the homes of respectively very famous: I have arrived at the built environments of complete strangers: I tease eyes: My eyes are  invited to possibilities: Witnesses may or may not see me coming: I am there: I am here:

Fascination is a demanding word: I am fascinated by what has been and what Joan Didion’s murder and mayhem allow me to dream to interpret: The photograph has not yet been made:

I am alone with Joan: Highway 101 slows as I near the LAX: Landing lights haloed over a city  I have visited many audiences: What may be captured is side of architecture that has many sides: I am a lighted drone: Illumination dances: Multiply the experience exponentially and maybe we will see what I have come to know:

A single Joan Didion memory has allowed me to revel in my mysteries of photography: A universe of mysteries: A treasure trove of analytical perspectives: Ouija boards atop one-hundred cities:

Was the man in the Hightower revealed: 

The promise of so many perspectives: The familiarity of the drama from above motivates me to my tomorrow.

Frank Gehry: 8 Spruce Street New York

Architecture of Cities: How We See Secrets

The New Yorker

When I was about nine years old, I sat in the rear-deck of a “Tiger Sunbeam” Grand Prix pace car: The race began and I was the one watching the racing cars gear up to catch me: “Vroom” raced the two and three cylinder cars: I couldn’t believe how fast I was moving: Actually in hindsight I felt as if I was in  some adult alternative universe: The sensation of standing still: The earth rotates behind me: The earth rotates in front of me: The figure eight race track became a blur: My future seemed to be patterned unrealistically: I became a human being at nine:

The little boy’s life is mine today: I race around cities: I never feel as if I am moving: Physics is explaining how I see: My captures are from the heart:

There is a setting on the modern digital cameras where you half press and decide later: It can be  called “dragging the shutter”: In essence, the photographer may decide later: For me, one million images I have dragged from my genesis until what might be requiem:

My entire world fades: My past captures lay like animated blurs: An infinite amount of celluloid and digital images circle my head like Road Runners skirting ahead of Wile E. Coyotes.

34th Stree West

A well known editor( now deceased) and a famous architectural critic approached me on different days with similar ideas: Secret cities: Los Angeles and New York secrets:

It was as if I became the Jaguar espying the Orinoco crocodile: Something so desirable: Something to desirously sink my teeth into: Something to conquer: My passion for a dream seemed within an eyelash: My spirits were rekindled: I had this thrilling dream to tell: Visual stories would highlight my passions: To share secrets: Not mine alone: For a few seconds I could be that Jaguar: The camera would capture what others have seen: The startling  possibilities of these revelations compelled me to whisper: “Shhhh”!  I will be capturing not just cities but the secrets that become: The books died soon after the propositions: Like all furious fires, the ambers remain: New  secrets materialized: The secrets my camera capture would be realized not just today but tomorrow as well:

If for one fraction of time you stood where I had once seen: If for one fraction of a second if you stood along my eyes as I captured the works of 40 Pritzkers: Thousands of ideas that became: If only you would lend me your eyes: I will share not only for what I capture, but from where I may have stood.

David Smith At One Vanderbilt

A blind person has grand ideas as if Fantasia lives inside of his/her dreams and memories: Fantasia is a visual concept that carries my eyes daily: What the world of  Saarinen’s, Wright’s, Niemeyer’s, Gehry’s, Piano’s and Hadid’s might be: This is not a placebo from the two cities’ books that faded: This world with the hundreds of architects and thousands of built architecture has become a treasure trove of dreams, memories and secrets: I share what I see  from where I stood:

I have seen The Secret Garden: It is not mine: It has been in the mind or reason of millions: It has become my Fantasia, my camera’s secret: My captures: My shares:

The Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes from São Paulo walked me through his city: His hands flew aggressively like a protest marcher begging for me to see his truths: His eyes were my guides to his secrets: To this Pritzker recipients real life Fantasia: It was a share that I felt was a secret for me: The way I captured his secrets became embedded in my mind: The memory of my lenses.

Secrets come in many forms: Take a few seconds to do the math.

Herzog and De Meuron

The Architecture of Cities: Magic in the Cities

Zaha Hadid: 520 West 28th street

Hemingway’s descriptions are maps of lives and entreaties: Please see what my words convey he begs:

My camera was born many years following: My eyes became aware of his eyes before I became…:

Now I dream to make visual captures in and about his words:

The human condition maintains a superabundant collection of pleasures: I spar daily with each and every one: I am not fighting them off: I am enjoying the full spectrum of what I am privileged to see: The sparring is like dancing in the ring with Muhammad Ali: Each day I anticipate a moment to be down: Each day I rise to see more than the day before: I am dreaming with my eyes wide open.

Grand Central Station

Moments past seem so warped in a mind wrapped in digital celluloid: The simple life of a poem spreads its words across my visual memories: My entire life of captures had been immortalized centuries before:

A.E.Housman

“Blue Remembered Hills”

“Into my heart an air that kills  

  From yon far country blows:  

What are those blue remembered hills,  

  What spires, what farms are those?  

  That is the land of lost content,

  I see it shining plain,  

The happy highways where I went  

  And cannot come again.”

Every day I share the cities I have visited: I don’t share my map: Rest assured I am not a wandering Odysseus, conquering Alexander or Genghis: I share to bare witness to the worlds I have seen and not yet seen: Those worlds are the places where magic lives: From my front porch to real time constellations: The nature of this photographer is not to explore the built environment of nations: It is to explore what magic may be captured in those nations:

River Park New York City

My image of me stands alone in a Shenzhen reflection: My image of me is reflected alongside the East Rivers’ United Nations: My image about me is witnessed by thousands inside Grand Central Station: My image of me stands alongside a  Zaha Hadid design: Her ghost in this glimpse is mine:

The magic in my captures rests somewhere between piano’s ebony sharps and flats: There is a silence between every key as there is between every multitude of shutter clicks:

Mozart played a key: Yo Yo Ma played a chord: A billion musicians have played a chord followed by the languid lingering anticipation of a next note: It is what I feel every day: Every day there is a quiet snap that is not a photograph until…:the magic of captures is the silence between chords and keys: The gasping exhale between Houdini’s death and breath: The silence of magic appears only when there is something that wasn’t there becomes: Magic in moments of capture remind me of chasing shadows that have never been: Magic in its entirety is a lovelorn adherence to the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour: The dreams of living in magical times is a mere moment: My dreams may be my reality:

The nature of my light is often unseen: Gamma rays come to mind: So small: So potent: I stand alone: Chaos abounds in surround sound: The camera is calm: An entire second passes: “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds” comes to mind: My reflection, is captured: Chaos and dreams live between musician’s keys; between magician’s miracles: silent magic captures my moment:

United Nations

The Architecture of Cities: Migrating Monarchs

New York

Marching into Cities:

The history my eyes remember:

How could I possibly imagine the incalculable migrating Monarchs flirting with the heavens infinite cosmos: Their wings flutter like voices possibly passionately heard: Those sounds may influence a millennium of captures:

I am a photographer surrounded by the beckoning of many voices:  The voices have influenced my photography: My photography is influenced by the voices that echo through my cities: My eyes temper the unmelodic melodies of all cities: My eyes capture the most pristine and unwieldy of dangers that are the nature of cities

I am here to remember:

I remember I was supposed to ride horse back through the Sierra Nevada:

I remember I was supposed to stretch my legs along the Swiss alps foothills:

I remember I was supposed to walk among Russians in forests dotted with dachas: 

I remember I had been asked to raft across the jungles of the Amazon:

So many dreams live in nature’s adventures still outstanding: My life at times is thrillingly alive in those bygone dreams.

Riga, Latvia

Sometimes I run around like an injured or fledgling rehabbed bird trying to rediscover formative  balance: I try my wings: I begin to fly: I fly to focus on the definition of beauty in a complicated dream: The capture is front and center: My eyes aflame I posture: Am I ready.

Heroes of sorts, come to my rescue: The voices of others celebrate alongside my aims: They appeal to most moments: I am standing alone with Miles Davis’s “My Funny Valentine?: Maybe: I am remembering Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia collective of built brilliance: Maybe: I am Man Ray’s blind ambition: His photography; the embodiment of visual wilderness: My mind is rekindled::Maybe: My mind imagines like Giacometti: I see thin giants of magical proportions: Maybe: Do I dream as Akira Kurosawa’s “Dreams”: Are my eyes invited into his heart: Maybe his eyes are invited into my heart: Maybe: 

Tokyo

How many thousands of heroes invite me into their world to make a single capture: Is this when the fledgling photographer finds strength to fly: How do I look: How does the capture become: What does Lewis Carrol’s Alice think.

Thousands and millions forged ahead thinking their ideas are theirs alone: Influences are circling in nano seconds above: listen:

My mind languishes above and through the city: I am only in Berlin, London, Paris, Rio, Barcelona, Moscow… for a single built capture: I march alone with an army: Why not open my arms and capture all of Rome, Hong Kong, New York and thousands more:

I navigate through not merely to make it all mine: I have a simple request for my camera: Make a memory of where I have been: I want to feel as if I am not merely capturing but communing with photography’s architecture, the architecture in photography:

The lingering madness that appeals most present in my mind’s eyes may be the heart of Calvino’s Invisible Cities: The truth from what you remember is revisited in various stages of blurred and sharpened focal points: The memory of your memories is home to various degrees of accuracy:

Architecture illuminates cities: Cities illuminate architecture: What I see and may not see is crucial: How I see where I have been is the definition of my captures.

I am alive to make something beautiful: I need to elevate the beauty of the mood: I grab hold of something finite: I examine the facets a bit closer: I find a way to break through atoms: I stare into the eye of a hurricane: I am inundated by something extraordinary: I breathe: I make a capture: I am allowed to dream.

Coming into Los Angeles