Architecture of Cities: Two Places as One:

Martin Puryear in Madison Park

Everyday nature beckons: My lenses focus on the irrational natural: The universes’ cities beckon: I focus: Mark Twain’s “Two Ways of Seeing a River” comes to mind: A beckoning for answers: The episodic rivers’ rhythm plays tricks on my eyes: Two views of nature flows: I step one foot into T.S Eliots’ beautiful enigmatic horrors: The tragedy and hope he possesses sing: Disaster reigns as it resonates: Beauty appears in his hand written The Waste Land: My eyes heart is crushed and alive:

I further my dreamscape: I step another imaginary tangible space: Beauty becomes passion: Darwins’ scientific dreams and adventures aboard the HMS Beagle ride ahead: The wake carries my imaginary eyes to another imaginary tangible: The two stories become cousins: My visual world, which may be a literary marriage appears: My mind is swirling with dreams not known: My past travels in reverse: centuries become my histories: My past and future desires are illuminated:

Metaphors seem abstract but true to my ears: I struggle to remain focused: I struggle to hear my steps: I remain to capture anew pictures from worlds apart: The worlds empower me: I am almost always like a naked octopus afoot: I troll behind a tribe of pied pipers: So we sing:

Empires appear drawn like topography seen from space: There is an axis between the north and south poles: I feel my camera may be connected to an entire planet in one single lens reflex: I have remembered inspirations and nightmares: The nature I have not seen, will become my camera’s urban landscape: There are photographs I had not taken: 

Seville Spain Police Station

In 1854, British photographer Roger Fenton snapped: His photographs bleed an elegancy that blinds me: His images  remind me that I have made a career with one foot in nature and the other as an urban architectural explorer: Roger Fenton one hundred and seventy-five years before me made the image that would become my mantra: Rievaulx Abbey appears as a life force to a grace in photography that will never be mine: A force to emulate, but never: In Fenton’s one breath nature beckons: His eyes on architecture fold into my lens: Now I am allowed to march alone and in my future:

In all of my photographs there is a song: I know I listen to as I follow my cousins and marriages to bigger and brighter more intimate captures ahead: I follow all of the signs left for me to gather like Pick Up Sticks: Heroes and Heroines abound: Animals and fairy tales thrive in my awakenings: My future is near:

Mark Twain’s mind floats atop the rivers currents again and tomorrow: I would die to be in his mind for a mere second or two: My calling as a photographer has always hovered near and above nature: It may have hovered above a river, a mountain a desert or urban oasis: A road through any wilderness real or imagined becomes a constant:

Los Angeles Library

 I recall dreaming above and below riptides: I recall the Russian KGB sending me through a Moscow forest into nothingness: I recall seeing  a garter snake at two: I broke a collar bone at age five: I saw a bear in the woods at nine: I recall being lodged between two cars: My motorcycle below me was steeped in the pavement: I recall I was eleven dancing tepidly or more at a concert in Watts, Los Angeles: Count Basie, Joe Williams, and Sarah Vaughn sang and played their hearts out for me and thousands more: My first or third kiss was somewhere between five and nine: I escaped a cult in Hawaii: I was a teen: Barely any clothes on I may have looked like Munch‘s The Scream: I share because I acutely remember shadows atop stones or grass on every corner: Why would I not remember every episode and more that influenced my camera’s eyes:

I feel I am alone with my camera: I trace the steps: The years pass: I certainly remember the nature of me seeing what would become: My life as a photographer spins amidst fathomable dreams: Moments I think I lived. 

My constant companions have been travels and travails for photography: From Acadia to New Orleans I have been: I have stood between Oscar Niemeyer and Zaha Hadid: I was alone atop a Dacha in Moscow: My eyes careened past the English Lake Country before I saw London: Photographers Julius Shulman and Gordon Parks once held my hands: I have been places: I have been among people: The nature I am culturally steeped in is alive.

Spirit: 

“Nature’s Way” 

“It’s nature’s way of receiving you

It’s nature’s way of retrieving you.”    

There a new criterion for nature my camera begs? My two feet stand between two universes: The natural and the urban natural: I experience a rush as it is thrust upon me naturally: Eidetic memory could be real: New captures are imminent: What about yesterday: What will become tomorrow: I race with an exaggerated pulse to see: Then it may be gone: I meander in a static flow: My world stands still: I move:

Forrest Myer artist

Architecture of Cities: The Watermelon Man’s Belle Époque

New and Old New York City

Decades have come and gone: My camera has been steeped in delicious: Steeped in time: Steeped in history: Miracles for my heart’s eyes: Cities became common exposures: Experiences became common: I realized I was not listening, enough:

Jazz musician Herbie Hancock wanted to write a song about the Black experience: He had known the history: He knew the sounds he had heard, but not the rhythm nor melody that could become a sound, a song: He listened acutely to the cobblestone back alleys of Chicago: He learned: The Watermelon Man became a sound, a song:

Listening for sounds reminds me of sounds heard and sound seen: I heard the dead in Babi Yar scream as they moved underfoot: I saw sounds of revolution as I past by the Potemkin stairs of Odessa: I imagined William Shakespeare: I stood aside the reconstructed “Globe”: I listened for the spilling beer and applause: I was hoping for a sonnet to be heard: I froze my stride in Moscow’s Red Square: What was I listening for: I listened: I reimagined China, in Shenzhen: What was I listening for:  I wanted to see my unknown China:My dreams live in three dimensional sectors: My dreams live among the realities of others: My camera rekindles the love of our past/present not yet lived by me:

Gravity’s Rainbow:

“…with a face on every mountainside,

And a Soul on ev’ry stone…”

Thomas Pynchon

Humayun’s Tomb: Delhi, India

:

I have imagined I lived inside the lives of astrophysicists and anthropologists: I imagine the future I relive the past: Everything is on the table: I merely have to place one foot in every direction and follow with my second foot:

All I am doing is manipulating my camera to hear the sounds and see before me our past:

I have heard the lessons of joy from Henry Miller’s everything: I have dreamed about “…Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.” I have imagined myself taking a winter’s farm life in O.E. Rølvaag’s “Giants in the Earth:

I have been everywhere and anywhere to hear my own “Watermelon Man” To hear the sounds that others make and “snippety-snap-snap”: I have dreamed about the stars over the Nile: I have walked atop streets not yet made: I have walked atop streets not yet excavated:  Sounds not yet emanating appear:I have not heard; maybe the Watermelon Man’s cobblestone’s: Then some more and  again I “snippety-snap snap.”

Somewhere in time I was in the dream from Bernard Malamud’s “The Natural.” I graced the luxuries and crimes in Hilary Mantels’ other century dramas: Robert Heinlein and Issac Asimov carried my eyes and, to real embellished fictions:

Imagine if you will to be on a corner with the immensity of industrial noises imbuing my film with more not known, yet: Imagine if you will to be standing alone at the “Four Corners” intersection: Sounds not heard yet are moving onward: Imagine the sounds never heard are what only your camera hears.

The Unisphere: New York City World’s Fair

There is the Belle Époch: A beautiful era: There is no such thing: The camera rises to capture  as any champion must do: To succeed, is to discover: There is a sweet spot ahead: It is not just a victory to capture; In failure there is some success: Rewards from century to century shift: We accommodate our dreams and hopes: We want all of our time here’s Belle Époch/a beautiful era:A century of World’s Fairs; The Great Exhibition of 1851: The 1889 Exposition Universelle; Chicago’s World’s Cumbrian Exposition of 1893; are only mere dates: The beautiful era only becomes when the  stones unturned reveal: Mountainsides afore: History before me and then some more are heard by some but not all: Ahead is our beautiful era

The camera does not see my Watermelon Man: My camera merely hears The Watermelon Man and awaits: My camera on steroids achingly listens: The next or another discovery is ahead: The Beautiful Eras, The Belle Épochs are memories our hearts, minds and eyes leech on: It is a secure place to enjoin our history’s link to us in the now: Every era must be beautiful because it is ours: Silly sad to diminish the now:

Allow me time for light: Allow me the time to photograph the past ahead: Allow me the time to capture; the heroic or the common: There are no miracles in sight: A mere arousal is ahead: A freedom to see the world: Sounds are near, we have yet to expose.

The Sultan Ahmet Mosque Blue Mosque detail, Istanbul, Turkey

Architecture of Cities: Lives not seen: The Home within the House: How We dream to Live

Philip Johnson’s Glass House

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

“Our House” 

“Our house is a very, very, very fine house.”

Every lens needs an imperative: My eyes follow: My heart espies a capture: I need a mere ear to hear how I breathe: It is there: Dreams never known become alive as fiction becomes a dream come true: Curiosities are unleashed my camera is unchained: Practical sensibilities are tossed into the wind: My heart races:

Beyond a mere design there lives a home: Beyond there is a story: Exuberance from memories surface: The ghosts walk about: Sometimes they are real: Sometimes I merely arch my ear to listen: I realize there is light: I follow: Possibly the future points towards possibilities: Dreamscapes seem to advance:

The heart of the matter is at hand: Some houses have faces: Some become an excavator’s dream goal: To see more and beyond: 

Acquainted I became with the ocean: My eyes follow the sight line: Frank Lloyd Wright captured my imagination: The Carmel by the Sea house posed: Aspen trees enveloped the mountainside before I saw: The Charles Deaton’ “Sculptured House” as seen in Woody Allen’s “Sleeper.” Eyeing me as I drove by: Aliens in the mist: The house bore a whole in me: Majesty in a futuristic way: Beautiful to dream about: Houses of our imaginations appear in many forms: The stories that accompany anything built is what differentiates between fiction’s truths and realities‘ dreams:

Architects:: Audrey Matlock

If you visit a Museum of Natural History, a story will likely unfold: The stories held inside will take you back to another time: You will visit the ghosts that lived before you, the ghosts that were you before now: A broad bank of empirical data may lift your mind: Places and dates some times may be forgotten: Everything is there to be relived and discovered:Our mind envelopes as we live in future discoveries: The history of another time will send you in reveries not engaged before: Then you will dream within your imagination: You will dream again: A place not encountered: A place of natural exotica awaits: Just take a peek:

The place at hand in all museums is a house: A house that is home to stories from the past: Marginally we  make way for another tomorrow: Behind the front door between four walls there is an evocative narrative: Behind the design there is an evocative plan: My camera enjoins the two identities and investigates: The simple joy of discovery is near:

I know that my camera lives in cinematic moments: Possibly my mind tries to trick the camera to mimic not merely the moments; but the sensories  traveling in and around the house: Stories are told to me: I lend an eye to see things: I hear and feel the ghosts:

Frank Lloyd Wright: Carmel By the Sea

The House does not have to be artistic in order to explore: It may be a greenhouse: It may be a multimillion dollar structure intended to be spectacular, but ending up like a cryogenic house of doom:

The beauty of a house in cinema is an adventure into a magical transactions from  possibilities  to the imaginary improbabilities: Hitchcockian Vertigo on steroids: That is why I engage: It is the manner in which my camera articulates its own galaxy:

“Suddenly”, there is Frank Sinatra attempting to assassinate the president: There is “Contempt”, atop  Capri’s Casa Malaparte: We entertain the “High Sierra” with Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino:

“Diamonds Are Forever”, introduces architect John Lautner to a larger audience: We visit the faux studio design intrigues presented in the Cary Grant drama: “North By Northwest”: “Gone With The Wind’s” Twelve-Oaks” passionately binds us to the mystery of a home’s power: “Giant’s” Reata reminds me of the power of past, present and future: Our lives today and tomorrow:

Cinema proposes to me: It offers a journey to an entire planet: Cinema allows my camera to manifest its images across the same planet I have seen in dreams: 

Joan Didion wrote about a murder and mayhem story occurring behind a white picket fence:

I have for decades reminded myself of stories never seen but imagined: Winnie the Pooh’s house “Sanders”, is a home for those young and old to see and touch: The animated possibilities are where moving pictures come from: It is the same way that a novel or novella can be written about Edward Hoppers’ “Morning Sun”  allows us to entertain the world we think we see and the world we imagine we might be able to see: The forever evolve continues to pace my visual imagination: I begin again everyday with another:

Many years ago I sat with the artist Jenny Holzer amid the shades of abundant Red Maples and Water Oaks: Her fame flamed in neo conceptually projected across buildings and city scapes:

Her mind saw galaxies beyond ours: Yet that day her eyes were home: Here in nature near her house was home: Jenny’s house stood near, but she was here: I at first wondered and then dreamed what what was inside her house: Were we home where we sat or was there another, home:

My travels have taken me from somewhere near and far: I have always wondered what lives lived inside the magic of a houses’ home:

Architect: Kengo Kuma

Architecture of Cities

Dubai in transition

THE WHISPERING SILENCE:

My gaze was frozen alive: A modern ancient world spanned across continents: Twenty-four hours measured as if a lifetime: Dhaka, Dubai and New York City posed for my captures: Ten Lenticular clouds danced quietly and aloud above and about: I was reminded of Picasso’s beach parasol hovering and shading over Jacqueline: You could hear the sounds and listen for the shadows:

A Mesopotamian cartographer heard whispers of silence: Sumerian and Akkadian ghosts marched in step: The ancients like band members joined in the play: My mind had nipped a scratch on a 78 LP: A carousel in rewind of a living history spun around a maypole: My eyes lived in centuries before and centuries to follow: The Queens Gambit on steroids appeared: Across territorial landscapes pawns and queens moved with dynamism at warp speed: Beth Harmon (the protagonist) display  was not for the faint of hearts: Walter Tevis was my Merlin: Manipulating each move across naked  terrains as if in a silent movie: Each move seen but not heard: My eyes were alerted to new captures: Antiquities appeared: Intergalactic possibilities appeared: This was no Walden pastoral: This was me trying to figure out each and very move with my silent  bumbling heroic comedic sidekicks Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin in tow: It was as if I was dodging energy bubbles to get where I needed to be: Time is never a friend: Twenty-four hours to conquer three cities became a window of trapezoids peering into my selective passions:

contemporary Mosque in Dhaka, Bangladesh

I dream again: My irises feel the melding colors from cityscapes atop: The colors I have seen, have never been mine alone: There is my next chess move: Maybe twenty to twenty-five moves ahead are planned: Like Merlin’s magical potions: His elongated fingers were creating moves to see: The exotic spell like dreams reminded me of another master with elongated fingers: The former Russian Grandmaster chess champion Mikhail Tal had legendary powers: Once under his influence, his magistral visions for board play could easily be a template for me: Imagine moving across multiple urban arenas with plans to anticipate ideas not seen: Imagine to assemble an army of ideas to see globally across metropolises for a lifetime: Can you hear the power of silence:

“I’ve had a lot af worries in my life, 

most of which never happened.”

-Mark Twain

Zaha Hadid: The Opus by Omniyat

On most days, a cascading plunge of seeable words and dreams appear: I pluck a single word from that memory: The word may or may not spawn another: Until I begin: 

Jack Kerouac’s Satori in Paris, plays havoc with my visual consciousness daily: Satori is an affliction: I have chased after meanings about meanings for an entire career: There are no accidents just moments: Every time I lift a device to see my world I inhale: Exhale follows a bit later: Time takes time: I just need to know if I have found what I am looking for: The whispers silently continue: I exhale:

Dreams become memories: Memories become captures: I make another move: Color is seen: A sound may be heard: I see: I move in or afar: I capture: Memories remember more dreams: 

The Flatiron New York City

Architecture of Cities: Below and Above

Looking North from the World Trade Center

I was ten years old when I first thought to fly unencumbered by an airplane or other devices: I saw flight from from thousands of feet above: I measured the landing from my perch to the softness of the green grass: I measured the landing into a caldera that had not yet existed: I was ten.

From the day after and the rest of my time I have allowed my imagination to tippy-toe from above:

 The Wings of Desire’ angel Bruno Ganz could easily have embodied an imaginary muse for Wim Wenders or myself: When Ganz stood wondering and eyes wandering, I managed to see what I thought he saw: He dreamed: I dreamed: Like an angel in flight: My wings alit into newly discovered adventures: I discovered: The film Wings of Desire is one of many reminders; something more is there:

It is my nature to realize my captures are not merely a landing but an investigation: I land from towering heights: My eyes rise towards heights unknown: Light shifts: Images change: My mind shifts: The images shifts: My mind engages: My mind disseminates a catalog of the entire visual world: It is like a million floaters swimming in my eyes: I merely need to harness the truth in my captures, my dreams: How else can I engage vantages: 

Desire is a powerful drug: I need to fly: I need to spread what wings I have left: My desires make frames that matter still: I inject a daily dose of flight desiring to make dreams in my eyes:

I have stood before the some of the tallest buildings on earth: I have stood atop some of the tallest building on earth: The measure of flight descending and ascending is dizzying: It is a manner of scoping out needs before I capture: I manner scoping: Then ask, what needs to be taken, if at all:

Architect: Renzo Piano: The New New York Time Building: New York City

Why not pursue what my eyes may see as if I was back in time: The 1932 Skyscraper Soulscomes to mind: A story almost one hundred years before Megalopolis: Though different yet akin to the nature of birth and rebirth in cities: So much on the line: A treble of brilliance in the air: The entire built environment from the ancient to the moment rests before me: I see my voice: I hear my pictures:

The history my eyes have seen is slowly disappearing: Everyday I begin again: I search for new history and new encounters that feel like my “first”: Then I begin again. It is as if I am accompanying Marianne Faithfull through natures’ conveyor of pollinator gardens: Britain’s long winding Ridgeway trackway takes us away and returns us to a place to begin again: Marianne’s later rasp is whispered: A couple of  Beatles  whistle “ The Long and Winding Road”: Around we go: To and fro my camera lives in the past, present and willingly, futures: My youthful exuberances mastermind my visual life in photography.

Tokyo from Architect Kengo Kuma’s Asakusa Culture Tourist Information Center

So many movies, book titles and songs create a harmonious mind centered archive: It becomes a gateway to something better: The reminder of the pleasures recharged my electrolytes: My irises brighten: Songs are heard: Celluloid captures: Scribbling continues: Discovery for a few moments is ahead:

Sometimes secrets are not seen: We miss capturing secrets: We make up stories about the ones that got away: The capture not made: I have missed seasonal moons, chiaroscuro sunlight married into shadows: I have missed my cities covered in dappling light: I have not taken certain risks: I will never come to terms with what is in my rear view but should have been caught: Snippety-snap-snap must always be heard: A pause can be deadly, a capture should be celebrated:

If something is there to be photographed, there is a reason. There is majesty in every frame, unless you pause to consider: My mind often takes a walk with  the late great photographer August Sander: He saw a united family in almost every human life: I see the mere make up of a city: It is a unity of our planet built: It is a family of figures I dream to capture. The movie title Make Way for Tomorrow comes to mind:

New York: 275 Madison Avenue: Johns-Manville Building : Architect: Kenneth Franzheim

Architecture of Cities: Tales and Fantasy

New York

The sounds of cities and calendar seasons change: Our hearts remain the same: Birds flock: Heart’s pulse: Colors abound: Each day the camera awakens to a curious why: Why this day matters before tomorrow and more than before.

Funny thing about the sounds of urban humanity: The cities I have traveled to and from marry certain forms of sound in and out of an inner sanctum, a triad of auditory connectivity:Cochela, Pinna, and the Tympanic Membrane.

Triads appears in many forms: Not least my photography: There are always new and better ways to make captures: I lean towards the marriage of  aperture, shutter speed and iso: Some hear automatically while snapping: My photographs are a decisive consciousness with mechanical and emotional applications: I need the “i’s” to matter: I need instinctive, involuntary and impulsive on all cylinders: There is only one way that happens: One mind one thought, the eyes and ears share it: It is sensory magic betrothed: Engaged, my eyes discover: I never merely press the camera to “action”: I listen to the sounds I am capturing:

Barcelona capture

Naming cities I have traveled to is like christening the three-hundred and sixty-one stones in the game Go: I like to remember but it is difficult: My memory valve gets a bit hazy from time to time: Dubai, Los Angeles, Delhi, Bangladesh, Barcelona, Paris come to mind: But moments are moments: Sometimes they represent cities and sometimes a mere “hello”: My entire catalog has many moments, many captures and many hellos: 

When you are racing a car, passing in a train, flying between countries and continents you unwittingly forget steps taken: It is not that the numerous is too much to remember: It is that the mind is in such a hurry to recount there is an unaccountable blockage.There is a pattern to what I do and see: Being alive in nature may feel simultaneously random and deliberate: There is the sound that is there but not seen: Alerted, the triads mentioned above move into action: There is a glance: I begin a search for captures: This is not how I see what I may think: IAm ust an explorer with a single frame capture in mind: Imagine a trek back into the woods: Imagine a trek back into the Great Basin Desert: There is no veld(t): There is only grand spaces for ideas to unfold: A mere positioning of my lens: My world churns vision into mind: Mind into vision: I espy a footprint of a built environment: My electrolytes punch in overdrive: I become equally reckless and mannered: I shoot to see, I shoot to capture and begin again:There are no imaginary ramparts in front or behind to dissuade me from making what I need.Animal droppings in some circles is a sign of fortunes or something more ahead: I collect the leads noting patterns of discovery: It is like seeing hieroglyphics embedded on a mirror facing you and behind: A collection of mysteries ahead and behind to decipher: Ahead and beyond remain imaginary:The ears hear a city:

Tokyo: Chiyoda- Hitotsubashi

Imagine the unnatural convergence of two ideas: Drink from the imaginations of Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away” and Henry Roth’s “Call it Sleep”: Imagine their  ideas nested in an ideal of a dream: Animated realities living in realities animated frame: Such an enlivened cushion could be stories realized but not yet told not yet seen:I have an overactive animated view of my own reality: My camera has always been lured to the expansive but intimate narratives: Fantasy about adventure and the entrée into the conflicts of terrors and horrors, delights and tormented struggles is a pretty complicated way to observe the cities and the homes atop our planet:Henry Roth’s “Call it Sleep” had it right: How beautiful it must be to witness in real time the struggle you thought you knew; thought you saw: I read the above drama, my mind imagines a focal length that captures, invites, discourse and pleasures:While gazing uninterrupted at the screen, my mind  languishly resolves to inhabit another world, narrative: Miyazaki’s animated, “Spirited Away seemed to take the freedom and life of captures into an alternate universe: I floated in celluloid: I bathed in Miyazaki’s fantasy’s frames: like “Call it Sleep” it is the intimacy of the individual, the author’s powers of perception that I celebrate: Both Roth and Miyazaki (among one million others) enjoin and enhance my, mine only, panoptic view; if only for one day:The cities I see, I feel: The interior urbanism lives are filled with steadfast passions: My camera celebrates an ideal way to dream: I should breathe in and settle for a few days of hula hoop among my Quokka friends and delight in the pleasures heard in my captures.

jűrgen Mayer Architect: The Metropolitan Parasol in Sevilla, Spain

Architecture in Cities: My Possum, My Opossum: The Art of Light Nobody Sees

Architect: Zaha Hadid: London Aquatics Centre

My Possum my Opossum:

Interchangeable in name and then: Buildings shine the same: Architecture is created and resolved similarly: They are categorically different but the same: Vastly different like Possum and Opossum, the words somehow germinated in some circles into one: Certainly the notion that they are interchangeable is false: Sometimes language unfortunately manifests a merger of convenience: 

Photographer Lee Miller and artist Gordon Matta-Clark imagine if; they stood side by side: My mind would have seen them like a possum mating an opossum: Maybe it was the other way around? It matters, but no matter: Their realities are so different yet similarities abound:

Miller’s picture of a bullet hole in the window pauses my inhales: The WW11 war torn landscape awakens fears of hell in my eyes: Gordon  Matta-Clark’s sledgehammer bludgeoned building walls across war torn New York City’s, “The Bronx”. The numerous buildings across the Bronx urban landscape: A world war frightened a planet: Clark created fright and fraught within urban decay: Miller captured in a single frame and more the same: Their dark might need context and reflection: The shadows of a planet the shadows of a city: A tiny window of a world’s travesty: A tiny window of a city’s…: One man’s Possum is another’s Opossum sometimes:

Architect: Thom Mayne: 41 Cooper Square, Cooper Union School of Architecture New York City

I often stand before and beyond a phalanx of towers: There are images, resting, hidden: Works of architectural designs fascinating a city’s landscape: The lure of we cant see or have is powerful: Sometimes because either we are shut off from them: Sometimes because spaces and places are unreachable: We often hope and imagine something enchanting may be ahead or behind: Something more or less than expected may be ahead or behind: There is an entire universe that has no view of what we see as we see it: If we see it:

The present and the past stand before the focal length: “Snippety-snap-snap”, certainly before all of what we may see what we think we see; vanishes:

The architectural designer‘s needs and intentions need to be seen through my camera format: Buildings are aware they may perish: Our eyes retain the buildings’ memory and our memories before those moments: Maybe something new will proclaim the future: And the camera begins again.

Architect: Thom Mayne: Diamond Ranch High School: Diamond Bar California

If one building stood before me for three-hundred and sixty-five days: Maybe I could shoot some thousands of “takes”: it would be like making a movie: “Action” is heard and I imagine rounding up all of the angles into a single “reflex”. It is what the camera is meant to do: The question is how to see it best. Allow it to become a single inhale followed by a whispering exhale: The title of David Halberstam’s The Best and Brightest, invokes my camera’s needs: The light, the best light and the brightest aperture!

Like Possums/Opossums we hide in plain sight; we stand in the shadows made by light; maybe a shadow of our own making; everybody you think is looking; they are not: We shoot.

Sometimes  the capture is like sparklers raining from the sky: Something captured seems to alight our eyes: The memory is to feel alive: It is a temporal life filled with multiplying constellations in our eyes, our future: More glittering stars above please:

How will my eyes be drawn to what we think we see: The enormous universe remains alive: What a way to see where I once stood where I think I might stand to see again.

Architect: Zaha Hadid: 520 West 28th Street: New York City

Architecture in Cities: Los Angeles Fires Inspire Memory and Lament: Traveling in time: We all must fall: But we all must rise again and again

Memory

There is a silence to be discovered in the lives of others: There is a private window into worlds seen and unseen: The silence we see and the silence we don’t hear prevails in our everyday:

Marcel Proust and Walter Benjamin come to mind: Maybe Stephen King and one million writers beyond may be attributed as well: There are a trillion sentences and paragraphs that are spoken and not heard across the planet: The universe needs to be explored:

The Los Angeles fires of 2025 break my heart: Lives never known, lives of others vanish before we can know the depths of the individuals; the centuries that preceded us.

A city can be best understood through writers of life and lives that not only reveal but reveal fictional truths that we can find comfort in: The writers can entertain us with not only fact or fiction, but a vibe: A vibe is what allows you to close your eyes recounting the ways a writer has seduced you.

Dream

Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Joan Didion, Walter Mosley, Thomas Pynchon, Michael Connelly come to mind: Maybe one million more (to use a surfing phrase) might “Step into Liquid”: Live in the sublime and fascination; Narrate Los Angeles’s where, what, when: The vibe, the treble and the heart of a city, the heart of what we have never known or might never have seen.

Cinema also has accompanied my mind towards new adventures: The  navigational verve that  filmmakers have recorded and invented for us is an adventure into the vortex of our mind and earth: It has made for a glorious travel log: Somewhere between Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly and more take us directly into the vibe of period and place: Into those steps there are paths not taken: Ideas not understood: Lives seen and not seen.

I think about the fires’ as a way to mourn the loss of place but not memory: A celebratory memory singed with lament: I have crisscrossed the entire four-thousand Los Angeles County square miles: I know there was a time when going from Chatsworth to Venice; Malibu to Pasadena was all in a days’ work: I was photographing: People, places and dreams; My navigation was plotted by a protractor and  compass dancing over my head like Merlin’s children: I scurried across freeways and roads: Some and possibly most never to be seen again:

memory

There is no capture without realities’ dreams leading the way: People and places are guiding lights: The “Original Pantry, The Griffith Park Observatory, Pandora’s Box, Hollywood sign, Manson murder sight, Watts Tower, Randy’s Donuts and Dolores del Rio’s home: They are frames that live in my depository of archives: Accompanied by  thousands more: The small and large transparency formats: The David Hockney, Richard Diebenkorn, Frank Gehry, Getty Villa and Center: They cozy up to my Pacific Coast canyons Hollywood canyons from highest peaks to Los Angeles’s ocean levels: Every enclave from one end of the city to another has been seen, but for what gain: China Town, Little Tokyo, Korea Town, Olvera Street remind me I have lived a never ending adventure: What was I seeking? Nothing more than a capture:

I feel the fire: Malibu County Line: Patricks’ Roadhouse down the road: Estrada Drive heads partially  north, east and west: Rustic Canyon cuts back north and west to Chautauqua: I came upon Temescal Canyon and Paradise Cove: I traced more miles to Calabasas, Mulholland Drive and  Cahuenga Pass:

I can be like a AAA map guide becoming lost at every bend in the river: How else can I trace my eyes’ heart: I travel to find myself lost and find my self discovered: The fires are non penetrate but the heat remains alive: The sorrow I feel for every last footprint amid the fires leaves me distraught with the what if’s: The digging into all of the land and lives lost makes me feel for the centuries never to be saved:

For a fleeting few seconds as I rode down Estrada I felt like  like William Wharton’s Birdy: My 1971 Moto Guzzi was a real dream: I imagined flight: My arms spread wide: My eyes caught Jack Nicholson joy dancing in the middle of Estrada: He was running across Estrada appearing part the Penguin, and part small time alcoholic lawyer from Easy Rider: He seemed sated with joy:

I chose not to fly further than here: I will always be sad about the January fires: James Baldwin wrote: ”people are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them”.

Los Angeles

Architecture in Cities: Color and Light into Pictures of Cities

One Madison Ave

I stood half naked: I tippy-toed just over four-feet tall. I was mostly six years removed from the womb: The spectral of the candy colored skies angled above:

The blue whale appeared resolute in its pose: The whale was still, quiet, dead: I imagined  almost alive: Her large eye looked me up and down: My imagination dithered: The summer blaze begged me to get a bit closer: The shade and shadows of the 60, 70, 80, 90 foot behemoth, posed: The whales’ vapors moved about: 

I had heard a rumor: A family of Pika’s had lost their way: I fused all of my young imagination into one thought: The blue whale most likely circled the seas for quite sometime: She espied a Pika  family ashore on  a tiny embankment: She might have been blinded by sunlight reflecting like a mirror on the Pacific: The Pika and embankment turned out to be a mirage: The huge mammal obviously lost its way: It skidded atop the shoreline in Southern California: My uneducated guess is explained: The Seven Seas can be a dangerous place.

House of the Oscar: Los Angeles

The California amusement park, P.O.P ( Pacific Ocean Park) stood a few dozen feet south: Dozens of wooden piles held the pier aloft: Screaming children and rumbling rides filled the air: I listened: I now know the whale and eventually the park would die an unceremonious death: The juxtaposition between the whale and the wailing voices saddened the moment: The noise and the quiet death of the whale was deafening. If there is only one way to define “an innocent”, just maybe that day was mine.

11 Madison Ave: New York

Yes she was dead: I am less than one hundred years of age and more than ten: I have remembered that incident as if I remembered even the time of death: The  entirety of my camera life has been reliving experiences of my own defining synesthesia: The very first time I touched the sky, I saw the colors that my camera might see: The very hallucinatory moment is about touching colors with music, music becoming colors: touching the colors of the sky with a bit of music: Experiencing synesthesia seems to live in my every snap. If you might imagine Keith Richard’s Gimme Shelter just above me in the sky with a bit of treble: If you might imagine Jimmy Page’s first notes from Going to California: If you might imagine them as dueling guitars as in Deliverances’ “Dueling Banjos”: Maybe then my visual life makes sense: 

From the moment my whale lifted her underbelly, my mind merged her currents of yellow diatoms and blue base to every color I have ever opened my camera to: I imagined her dipping into the waves back to her Seven Seas: I imagined all the colors of the sun’s prismatic glow in a single frame: 

I imagined the blue whale for an instant dreamed that she would be back with the seafaring pod: I imagined she dreamed as death stood near by: Her underbelly again appeared like a current of yellow diatoms breaking through the waves out to sea: It was not psychotic chaos: It was not an angelic caress: I imagined I heard her plea: It is the way I see what I hear: She faced death: I was young: When I remember this moment my camera lines brighten and then I snap.

Rem Koolhaas Architect: Rothschild London City HQ: “New Court

Architecture of Cities: Birds of Prey, Birds of a Feather

Norman Foster: Hearst Tower: New York City

My eyes torn: Ruptured celluloid sprockets play before my mind’s eyes like a repeating life in retreat:

Decades of days before are no longer mine: My mind is reduced to the days no longer mine and a mere few days ahead:

To come:

It is a remarkable reckoning when you realize the embers of generations before are fading:

I unwittingly rewind the adventures had: Adventures not had may become adventures to be:

My mind’s eyes have guided me through stories not told and blindnesses not yet near:

I have seen the summation of my camera’s life: I have seen what the natural days, natural life has left behind me: What might be ahead: A dream in rewind: I imagine maybe be before there are no more:

Every single day has become a deciphering reckoning with a quantum variable of truths:

Richard Rogers: Lloyds of London

I have glimpsed into not merely the minds of others: I have glimpsed into the narratives of decades of an entire framed collective: Simply asserted, it is the the mind’s of others that I seek: Remarkably, my imaginations fantasias appear to fleeting:

I imagined two birds enjoined by one feather: I imagined two birds from that feather caressing and challenging: Rainbows like feathers of many birds mingled: Under the guise of cloud cover a kaleidoscope of photography’s adventurous prisms come to life: I breathe hesitantly: I might die if everything above disappeared:

Everyday my camera life is colored by people and places I had previously photographed: My eyes unbeknownst to me have captured millenniums in a variety of my every moment: All things natural are fantasies:

Making myself speed up with the times is like becoming an ever evolving dance partner fromEx Machina: An AI slow dance mingling among birds of a feather, birds of prey: Everything that I need: My eyes become:

Different times and unlikely days I once shared with Sir Norman Foster, Sir Richard Rogers: They were two old friends that shared what could be in this twentieth-twenty-first century: They designed according to dreams none others had conceived of: Their mark on time past, present and future are immediately with us: Their minds are the ones I met almost three decades past:

Richard Rogers: The original Millennium Dome: Presently: The O2 Arena

They temporarily became my camera’s “birds of a feather”and “birds of prey”: Early on my guess is that they were enjoined at the hip as they made headway forward: My guess is that as birds of prey in pursuit of more their heads challenged for commissions and possibly butted heads: 

They became a cornerstone among others of how I see my days past and ahead: My camera does not live in any particular reality: My cameras’ see something that those  two birds above may appreciate: An F-stop that may freeze in time all of my architects: Maybe in particular the two birds above ( Foster and Rogers) contributed most ably to how I see: How I learned to see:

I have known the names of famed: Sometime ago I considered what it may be like to know the minds of those: Sometime ago I considered what my camera needed to see before I can no longer see:

Time took care of all of my inquiries and considerations: Time of course can massage most  misguided concerns: Maybe it is true that I am merely a page in a book somewhere:Brewer’s Dictionary, “Fables of History and Myth” seems most apt:

It is the aperture left wide open that embodies all of my stories, all of my dreams: Old ones in the past new ones ahead: Camera settings F/1 or F/1.2 appear to be most sufficient for my mind to process the decades that are behind me and the few er days ahead: The open aperture and wide  open glass greet every nuance of every day in the most welcoming fashion: An entire universe passes by ready to be seen and captured; my mind allows for all of the light that will become:

Norman Foster’ The Willis Building, London dances with Richard Roger’s Lloyd’s of London

Architecture of Cities: The Yellow Rolls-Royce and Philip Johnson

Philip Johnson in his Sculpture Gallery

The perch: It is a place where the eyes capture worlds colliding and dreams shaping: The perch is where my memories live: I listen to the eyes: The perch appears: Every dream becomes real for my camera:

My every, begins with the nightmarish possibilities assumed in both Rod Serling’s “A Kind Of Stopwatch” and “Ninety Years Without Slumbering”. When time stops, I am alone: Alone is when the shutter sounds loudest: Then there is almost everything Orwell: His “Road…” books: They begin and end with the paths to a place: The place where my camera may see again something: Every day the end may be near: Serling and Orwell complicate the pleasures my mind sees: What a dream that may be: Their end is not mine but embraced nevertheless: My end will be a final capture: My eyes gratefully realize there is today: 

I daily realize I am a dreamweaver: I became aware while watching Woody Allen’s movie Love and Death: In one train car, the preening rich Russians frolic: Across the train tracks, the peasants sit miserably in flickering fading lights: I inadvertently entered the minds of others: Observing minds of others  became a window into something more:

The Capital Grille Restaurant: Architect Philip Johnson

The Yellow Rolls-Royce movie is a nice story about people traveling through time like myself: My eyes see the history of mine and others in each frame: Across maybe a decade my eyes travel from England in remaining posh times: The story travels through the decade ahead: Through France, Italy, Yugoslavia amidst armed resistance and more: My imaginary moments are remembered along with famous cohorts of 1950’s and 1960’s: Rex Harrison, Jeanne Moreau, George C. Scott, Ingrid Bergman and more: Actors dramatizing era’s of yore with the yellow 1931 Phantom ll in tow:

The idea of feeling the visual impact of a world foreign to me is almost too delicious: A foreign world with foreign countries in foreign times ablaze across the celluloid screen is imprinted on the eyes forever: The importance of the cinematic moments compel me to embark on my own journeys: To capture what my camera may dream: Sans a yellow Rolls-Royce.

My everyday is about living in a cocoon waiting to be released: The fear remains everyday that I may not be released to capture: My eyes fading before I am free to see becomes a nightmare: Then I dream some more: I live in the fantasies created by cinema: I believe in every frame: I dream I was careening through Europe in a yellow Rolls-Royce.

My camera dips its toes into parallel universes: I see what my camera imagines in a glow of fantasia and the bracing realities of our everyday history: I am sure that is what makes picture taking so pleasurable: To awaken in a dream and to stroll in realities is quite the emotional ride: The ride of necessity:

The AT&T Building New York City":Architect Philip Johnson

The Yellow Rolls-Royce is a composite story through a decade of real fantasy’s: The very same decade a real life journey and adventure took place: Over the course of almost a decade the architect Philip Johnson ingratiated himself with Europe’s German vision: Bon Vivant, in various years he landed in a 1929 Packard convertible: 1930 A Cord-L convertible and the 1937 Cord B12: 

I often wondered about the mind of this architect: As I remembered dreaming of passengering in the “Rolls”; what if I sat side by side with the architect Philip Johnson: What if I was passengering in his posh, stylish moments of automobile design: What was the mind like in this American with a tad of German vision in his own dreamscape: What if in the moment I had been privy to the insight of his vision, dream,mind: What would my camera know to see: How would we merge our visions as he explored all architects, architecture and cultural agendas in single frame work:

The two separate universes of fact and fiction, imaginary and real are mine to imagine: Separate universes to allow my camera to run amok with cantilevered fantasies: The eyes travel(ed): The continent countryside and cities of another place and mind are mine: 

I have spent a career reckoning with where I take the camera to see what needs to be seen:

Philip Johnson once opened his Rolodex for me: He thought it was important that I meet Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, David Childs and more: I was invited to see worlds not known to me:

Everyday I twist my rubik’s cube anew as one would impress upon a lucky charm: I pray alongside my diving rod: Imaging what I might  I imagine in all universes parallel to mine: I have been living in dreams: It happens to be such a beautiful reality: The universes may belong to others: My camera belongs to my histories.

“The Lipstick Building: Architect Philip Johnson

Architecture of Cities: Two Captures

Architect: Brazilian Isay Weinfeld: New York: The Jardim 527 West 27th St: The automated garage

I dreamed of something mythical: I imagined a woman running atop her toes through the Florida Everglades: Hundreds of white lily pads bent into the winds: Two little white arms embraced  twenty-three black, white and red sixty-foot mangroves: Their “hats” adorned like women from the Gilded Age: Austere, poignant and necessary:

I imagined the girl’s eyes espying close ahead three dozen Amaryllis Dancing Queens: Close and near the Malaysian Reticulated Pythons swam ahead of the African Ball Pythons: The crocs’ eyes bulged below the surface: The denizens giggled just ahead: Equatorial currents had been spotted careening north: All eyes peaked into the Everglade’s sky: The end was insight: 

One day I imagined the ruins of the ancients: My eyes fluttering among the flickering lights:The outmoded Kodak slide carousel hiccuped image after image: The end of...is near: The end is never here nor…: All that I knew may be vanishing: My eyes continued:

Architect: Isay Weinfeld: The 4 Seasons Restaurant: New York City

Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi nestles inside a tiny corner of my cerebrum: I find the comfort in an imagined parallel life: Miller stood before the Hellenic archipelago as one might imagine a fortuitous escape among gods not seen, not known: A man dreamed of discovering adventure and a life not told: Henry stepped forth: This man’s world was altered for every day following: Miller’s eyes like a camera’s, revealed in words, lives with my every breath:

As I slept through many nights, rewinding The Night of the Hunter over and over like an unmistakable scratch on an record album: Robert Mitchum’s “Harry Powell” character might have been seeking the good in evil: His character was saddled on a horse sitting atop a ridge in the daylight’s end: Darkness was ahead as he descended away from the light: In my imaginary fashion, I sat on on the horse’s rear: My mind was begging to return to the light I could breathe in: Cosmic alternate universes battled in plain sight: The beauty of hell upon us was almost too desirous: Director Charles Laughton and Cinematographer Stanley Cortez created the most beautiful hell: Cinema’s most beautiful black and white is my ode to eternal cinematic wonders:

Architect: Isay Weinfeld: A Room With a View: The Jardim: New York

Ideas appear: I feel the mind’s eyes of Francis Ford Coppola: Apocalypse Now’s Willard and Kurtz come to mind as I enter all cities and a city: I am equally desirous and delusional: A search for answers lifted its eyes before mine: Everything I manifest is embedded in memories of the past and future tenses: It is a whirlwind of visuals that never play tricks but allow me to see more than might be there: Every moment begins with a new a focal length: I define what I am measuring for: I reimagine every dream I have ever met: I reimagine every dream that became mine: I reimagine every way I have celebrated ways to see: Then there is the photography: The reimagining from fantasy to reality: The reimagining of what my camera’s framing could be: I understand what is in view: Willard and Kurtz may vanish in the moment: I then snap:

Silhouettes, reflections and chiaroscuros’ remain ahead: I enter new destinations: I enter into the darkness of light: I compose photographs: I am finally secure: My dreams became my companions: My eyes flex: I can see: I bring the heart of everything above into a simple matter of speaking:

All that I have imagined: Every written word, every cinematic film frame, has become embedded into a single capture: It is something I never realize until the secret moment appears: The moment is alone: My awakening eyes are alone: My life’s constant awakenings have sculpted the visions my eyes rest with, rely on:

The day in play: I planted two feet: I crossed town: I headed east and west: Two destinations held two separate experiences: I was pressed to find captures that feel the same but describe one intention: To explore possibilities: 

Imagine to invoke Miller, and all the above play date cohorts into a single snap: Imagine to articulate in a bouquet of dreams how an architect might complete effortlessly the efforts of design: I have spent nearly a professional lifetime exploring each day not for  the answer but a path: My armies of influential voices remain: Like Man Rays’ Fifty Faces of Juliet, my mind remembers reimagining all of my yesterdays.

Architect: Isay Weinfeld: The 4 Seasons Restaurant New York

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)