The Architecture of Cities: Past and Futures

The Architecture of Cities: Past and Futures

True story: The second time I thought about my life dancing at sea with whales, occurred after my experience with CERN: My head felt like it was in an intergalactic vise made from an accelerating collider: I stood a few feet into the Atlantic Ocean: I faced a whale a few hundred yards as the “crow swims”, head on.

The solos of Miles Davis rarely heard played to my heart the way a whale might send songs across the many seas: To anyone who might listen, it was not the heart that heard the soaring melody’s but my eyes:

There is nothing literal in my photography: images are shaped by the possibilities: The sounds of whales in my present future is seemingly possible

I have posed my camera in front of many fabulous architects: Niemeyer, Piano, Hadid, Kuma, Mayne, Ando, Gehry, Foster, Ito, Prix, Johnson, Ban, Venturi, Nouvel and hundreds more: The notions of how they, I, see our built environments present and past have been absorbed into my cameras like a family of ghosts sharing generational ideas through the centuries. There are many rewards gleaned in these experiences: My dreams will one day pass on or die: I need to work harder is apparent, not in life but in the moment of the capture: My dreams may make my pictures: My eyes and body must continue to work overtime.

I have been thinking a lot about the cost of photography: Not the bank($) but the time to make a picture: today, most photographers spend hours in front of a screen or with the hours attributed to a specialty lab making the photographs successful: “ya gotta do what ya gotta do”.

I have always known at first glance which picture might work best for me: There are two agendas: The one that makes my heart flutter: my eye lashes shiver: The breezes that bring my body upright. The Great grey owls’ eyes become mine: My eyes lean into the moment: the moments that need to be captured: My dreams have been actualized: the eyes say aye. A funny thing about metaphors.

The second course of action: agenda: where there was none: If I am willing to sacrifice my life there is a reason to make a capture: Yes of course there is no reason to leave a life behind: But just maybe the exception to the rule is a capture versus a future: not for any legacy nonsense: But to learn how to breathe new life into todays’ moment and possibly tomorrow’s:

I needed to make a picture of a building: Yes I could have used a drone: Yes I would have spent hours in front of a screen determining the values of an image:

I received permission to stand outside of a window on 57th street and Madison Avenue: Yes! To a bit of the crazies: The picture was for a book on the Pritzker Prize: I felt I needed to make a picture that could not have been made unless I extended the frame of my body a few feet off the ledge: Eyes bent like an animated “Road Runner”: Tarzan nor all forms of simian cousins could challenge my shrill as a couple of toes mimicked a scene from The Crawling Eye.

Was the experience worth it? Oh, absolutely! Was the photograph successful? Oh, absolutely, maybe.

What is it about the eyes of a singular voice that make architectural images pronounced: Just maybe the voices of others that fuel the visual discourse: The privileges I have experienced by spending camera time with a percentage of the best architectural minds of the twentieth/twenty-first century? Or has it been the flourishing joys from the likes of Henry Miller, Goya, Bill Brandt or ten-thousand other cultural savants.

What is it about the spectacular future: What is it about the spectacular past: It doesn’t matter: I have spent a lifetime fusing into a single entity the spectacular of the new/future and the pasts’ beauty of the present future into designs of architecture that reign supreme in my consciousness:

If there is such a thing as “most important”, I have noticed that the spectacular of the new: newest material or shapes of design reigns supreme. My attention has been fused into a single entity: The significance of the past and the beauty of the present/future grips my passions:

My Great grey owl espies its prey: My whale winks with a nod for a future encounter.