Me, Mark Twain, Jackassrabbits, Baseball, Santiago Calatrava and The Museum that Flies

I began to run. I imagined I was a combined Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams from Chariots of Fire “Chariots of Fire”. I wasn’t serving or chasing God in any fashion. I just needed to run faster. I was in a race against the clock. My head flailed, and my hair flapped from side to side. My legs felt like they were hurdling Maya Lin “Wavefields”. The summer heat, the sweat, every pore of my body was working overtime. I leapt one more time and stopped. My lungs were protesting. My heart pronounced “finished”. I was processing that I had arrived. I let go of two fifty pound camera bags to the ground.

Was previsualization to become a reality? I ran to the museum entrance. The sign said “closed”.

I saw my reflection. “Lamentable”. I looked like Mark Twains’ “jackass rabbit”; “… three feet long, has legs like a counting-house stool, ears of monstrous length, and no tail to speak of. It is swifter than a greyhound, and as meek and harmless as an infant”. { Mark Twain, “Roughing It”}

2003 was my “jackass rabbit” year. I covered more than fifty thousand miles without exhaling. Today I had just completed photographing a couple of projects in Chicago. The summer in one of my favorite American cities can be painfully hot. With every step I felt the need to shield my head and eyes from a sun I couldn’t see. I ducked into the shadows. I stepped into air conditioned spaces along Michigan Avenue for a reprieve. The heat made the the gods laugh across the universe, “we are going to fry another one”.

Burning and sweating I began to reconsider my options for the rest of the afternoon. Option One: I could have a couple of martini’s and explore the city at night. Options two: speed up to Milwaukee for a dream assignment: Capturing Santiago Calatrava’s Milwaukee Museum of Art take off like a bird across Lake Michigan at sunset. I mistakenly hopped on to I-94W at rush hour. The two hour drive turned into four hours. I pounded the steering wheel. Air conditioning blasting, windows down, heart afire.

I arrived too late for a twilight shoot. My museum had its wings and beak tucked away for the evening atop the lake. I stood in place for quite sometime. I imagined I was a rookie baseball player arriving to the “SHOW”: (To get called up by an MLB team, you need to be the highest-rated player at your position). I made a quiet pirouette. It allowed me to take in the magnificence that will be a glimpse into tomorrow’s future. I need not be reminded that every time I make a photograph, I am blessed. I hardly remember what boys and girls dream about. Sports, photography and life come to mind.

I checked into my hotel. I had my last meal before my performance. I sat in the window looking down the hill towards my tomorrow’s moment and sipped a few cold drinks. I felt like one of those summer “Magnum” photographs of New York summer tenement images; sweltering heat pervading every breath. I scanned the immediate Milwaukee signage; Harley Davidson, Pabst Blue Ribbon and more.

My motivation today for tomorrow was enlivening the reason I became a photographer; something was out there that needed a “snap”. It ain’t like hunting the wilds of Africa or…But I do like knowing that the word “anxious” sits inside my head every moment I am a photographer.

Morning arrived. I grabbed one hundred pounds of tools and ran down the hill.

I set my position and mentally knelt in prayer. If the wind was beyond specified knots, the wings would not open. I was a one man wall preventing any tourists from stepping in front of my viewfinder. I heard a powerful “OH”. I turned and there were my wings rising. The great engineering

feat unfolded before my eyes. My camera had seconds before I could not hold off the massive group of people who wanted what I had…and then one hundred people poured past me.

My prize was inside my film.

I went home that day to New York. Days later I was fortunate to get past Santiago’s “Gatekeeper”.

We spent 3 hours talking about his work and my experiences photographing his working more of my journeys. He gave me a few treasured gifts. I left his home for mine. Years later he trusted me with a secret that I have kept for almost twenty years. His works have intertwined with my life as a photographer for most of my career as a photographer. In a way, Santiago Calatrava is to the twenty first century what Mark Twain thought Baseball was to the nineteenth century:

“Baseball is the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century.” -Mark Twain