Bangladesh: National Martyr’s Memorial: Designed by Syed Mainul Hossain
The entire planet is insignificant until we are not: The infinite worlds above we cannot count: We are small: All that resides above us is an infinite collection: Worlds never to be known, never to be known: Nothing is infinite below us: It is us: I celebrate the lives before my yesterday:
The imagined bend in the river mingles with Naipul’s A Bend in the River : The often considered narrative story and the imagined vanishing point lives in lives past and about: Its brilliance is brilliant: The closer we get to a reality the more we dream about what is beyond the bend:
The imagination may subjectively be about bending facts about fictions: The real vanishes as we move close and afar: The impossible becomes possible: Something becomes:
Journeys are often about what may be discovered: The dream of what may be discovered: The corners of the global planet are waiting:
Monuments and memorials are arguably about fractions: The fractions of our history’s population: The fractions of lives lost: mourned: celebrated:
A detail of; Harriet Feigenbaum’s “ Indifference to Injustice…Is the Gate to Hell : A reference to Auschwitz Partially liberated by the Ukrainian army
This sculpture is in Madison Park NYC on the Appellate Division Courthouse
Wim Wenders Wings of Desire approaches the separation between those who are us and those who are our past: Every which way you look at it; we are us:
We often lament what was once: We desire to have one more word: We have lost something someone from our past: We merely desire to meet again with: We have stories that are incomplete: We reach to lives past merely to touch: Touch their voices: We have heard the last words: We lend that story to those around us: Then there is the future’s share of this past: What monuments and memorials may be to some:
The death of the past is so much more interesting in hindsight: It offers us a key: That key allows us to unlock a sophisticated interlacing of our emotions entwined with man’s history and our own: An immersion of words and worlds; Emotions are linked to a woven weave of yesterday, tomorrow and today:
Lafayette Cemetery in New Orleans. La
We entertain to visit monuments and memorials for numerous purposes: The purpose is central to “I”: Certainly we visit the dead: Certainly we speak to our histories: Certainly we may imagine: Certainly there is that moment: Certainly we hear the worst of our lament: Our sorrows are “us”:
I disappear to another capture: I often inadvertently visit the dead: The stone and earth you remember become my camera’s capture:
The many memorials and monuments are legacies to the revolutions of time: A record of life in frames: My camera allows me to expose the hidden discretions equally: I think with what my eyes might hear:
I remember ferrying across: Paris, Moscow, Kyiv, Berlin, Istanbul, Bangladesh, New Orleans, another fifty states, cities and various continents: Memories distort reality: Reality is mostly distorted:
I have never seen atrocities: I have seen notorious burial grounds: I have seen forgotten burial grounds: There upright somewhere in our minds are monuments and memorials to things we have seen, things we have dreamed: For something better and worse there is always more to remember.
There was a tectonic shake the night my grandfather was buried: The entire family laughed: Some joked that my grandfather, Lou, bellowed, ”tell me it ain’t true”. It was a certain end to a life lived.
I am neither an excavator or exhumer: I am neither an historian or anthropologist:
My camera merely allows me to see what might be a dig, a discovery or an invention:
The stories or less that I see are always present: Looking for a truth buried when it rises right below your eyes is what movies and novels are made from: The most exacting truth for me are my hours sitting alongside monuments of memorials, memorials monumental reliving lives that are not mine:
I know my history: I know how genuine the atrocities by demons before us have lived: I will never knowingly live in that arena:
The globe for me is too large to see in my lifetime: I carry with me from city to city memories of things: Chaos and more that I have imagined: Someone’s past, living or dead is a peek into history’s human behavior.
If you will consider that I have stood in front of ten thousand built environments: Then allow yourself to imagine how the minutes become hours; the hours become days; the days become years; my life becomes: My photography may only be beginning.
Robert E. Lee Monument: New Orleans, La (removed)