#Greenwich #Royal Observatory #London
Zaha Hadid
Saarinen Ice Rink New Haven
She said, “you should go to China if only to see Mao’s gold. When my husband traveled with Mao, he told me that he got to see where all of the gold was hidden”.
Lois Snow
My earliest photography dream was to trace the steps of Genghis Khan in China. It would have been a fabulous journey through a time machine of visual delights. I imagined the landscape to be both real and fantastically beyond any known realm.
Years later, 1987 to be specific, the Chinese government asked me if I would be interested in emulating my “Soviet” cultural portrait series in China. I was excited. Just maybe Genghis Khan was in my sites. The offer seemed to intellectually bind my mind to an imaginary game of “Go” with the Chinese. Too many moves for this novice. And then it got worse. In the end Heironymus Bosch’s “Hell”seemed like a quiet place. I lost the game. I still wonder where the gold was/is hidden.
Today, I imagine that I have morphed into a Jane Goodall like student of gorilla behavior and an Archaeologist: The above is the closest way I can describe how I approach the life photographing buildings, and understand what stands and what stood before. It is a fabulous place to be for a photographer. The camera dreams, I dream. With luck I execute an image that becomes something more than a still frame. A fabulous place to be.
What lies beneath:
Over forty years my archives suggests that at one time I needed to see people in all of their cultural ways. Today, my architectural photography compels me to imagine skeletons and fragments from a thousand millenniums underfoot. Everyday I inadvertently dance on their lives. Everyday I dance to the lives that lived before me. I engage the quietude and magnitude that architecture presents. I celebrate the deafening silence it entails. We cannot look at the built architecture and merely say there it is. Undoubtedly when we begin to appreciate what lies, what stands before our eyes, one must think of the past and future tense as a way of molding our appreciation for architecture’s history.
My privilege is to work taking pictures. My luxury is to travel for someone or entity because of what I will see, and the way I will see. So the jet takes me to ancient lands. I meet the people (Niemeyer, Gehry, Hadid ) who contribute to the world’s fascinating footprint and more. I marry decades of plausible physical scenarios to make a living composite from everything I have learned.
Many people have traveled to the various ends of the earth for work or pleasure. But few people have been to New Haven CT. with my friend Greg Lynn, and hear him say “aren’t you going to shoot the Saarinen. Few people have stood with Architect Kengo Kuma and hear him say, “you should shoot the National Stadium by Kenzō Tange before they tear it down”. Few have heard Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes suggest that I should not miss The Oscar Niemeyer in São Paulo.
Few people have had hundreds of architects fill their mind with an infinite amount of matter.
If I was not able to dream about Genghis Khan and the gold in China,
I might not have been able to imagine and consider where we have been and where we might go. I might not have been to places on the planet that have made my camera a recorder of our times.
Being able to make decades of photographs reminds me of the line from Aretha Franklin’s Angel:
“Keep lookin and just keep cookin”.
#India
Tokyo