Disney Hall by Frank Gehry
Frank Gehry sat by my side: Frank looked like a cat on a hammock with a Cheshire grin: The “cat” whispered: “let’s roll”.
The two hour train from New Haven Connecticut to New York City Grand Central station was possibly an imaginative reality: There was and is always an illusory frequency of highlighted cinematic rewinds in my mind: In this moment The Trip to Bountiful : Driving Miss Daisy and Strangers on a Train enter my guileless mind. Most photographs I make are related to a cinematic or music influence: The dreams I have in my virtual life making pictures is a dream within the reality that I might see:
277 Fifth Avenue and more
Frank Gehry’s eyes reminded me of Geraldine Page’s in “A Trip to Bountiful”: Peering out the trains window, his eyes equally soft and electric that danced within his genius mind as if he was seeing a newfound landscape: He was more than eighty years of age at that time: His youthful past met head-on his aged architectural prowess: I of course was the Rebecca De Mornay character: yes, yes different genders: a train instead of a bus (but age appropriate). Geraldine, Rebecca, Frank and me became a tailor made play for present futures and past dreams: So we shared on our Bountiful road trip a bit of who we are on the inside that those on the outside rarely see.
Frank asked me if I had made any photographs of his “works”. So of course I pulled out my favorite of the dozen or so Gehry’s I have photographed. He whispered as if looking around stealthily: “I have never seen that angle before; why is that? I told him he has probably walked by that location one-hundred times: The blue probably deceived you: It is the color of design and this case the blue that blinds most people: The building being a space gray, the heat rays from the bright twelve-o-clock sun has an oxidation that is seen but not recognized:
NYC Avenues in reflection
I tell Gehry that I have always thought of this image as a Star Trek Black Hole moment where the captain orders ”warp speed” and the ship disappears into darkness. “How come I don’t own that image: This is where he becomes Miss Daisy and I am the chauffeur Hoke: Well of course ( graciously)I would love for you to own it. “It is really beautiful” Frank says as we continue to look at more of my photos on my iPhone.
Making a Frank Gehry “pic” set the agenda for decades of my photography: All of my photography of architecture has had many layers of relevancy: History, footprint, place, time and more.
I realized with Gehry’s moment that the dominance of shape is enhanced by the shape of light and the shape of color: In the family of the primary colors, blue is the lowly cousin, the third child: red, yellow and some blue make up the spectrum that we see in photography: Well that is an approximation that I assume in my work: Somehow over time, blue became my steadfast omnipresent companion.
St Mary’s Cathedral in Tokyo by Kenzo Tange
My dreams suggest that I have lived among the Blue Whale sand the blue oceans they inhabit for many lifetimes: I have dreamed about blue sky’s not seen: My cameras have paraded among bonnets of blue bouquets: of Hyacinths, Marigolds, Periwinkle irises in tow.
Blue in all of it’s guises is the the most present color in the universe: Blue is the rarest of the colors that we know:
I live inside the bluest of Sapphires that mirrors my wandering mind and eyes. The blue melancholy of Coltrane’s Blue Train and Mile’s Kind of Blue whisper throughout my nights: My lens reaches out to make a blue moment: a photograph that will forever be seen and unseen:
We arrived at Grand Central Station: As is customary for strangers on a train: We parted ways with two things on our minds.
Feeling Good:
“…it’s a new dawn
A new day
A new life…”
Anthony Newley/ Leslie Bricuse
