The Architecture of Cities: New Cathedrals Part Three

February 15, 2024

adjacent to the Pompidou Art Installation by Jean Tinguley and Niki de Saint Phalle 1983

Nary an eye can see it.

Not even a “Moon’s eye” can see it all.

A glimpse is just a glimpse, a glimpse is just a glimpse: I wish I could remember what I remembered yesterday. That is what most people rewind in their mind’s recall.

It is very personal it is very universal: You leave your parents to become an adult: Your parents pass and leave you as an adult: what glimpses of your past do you recall.

The art of architecture and the architecture that is home to art are edifices of cultural delirium. To the moon and back there is so much to see and absorb that objectively it is impossible to remember what we have seen today or yesterday. Details are funny evasive components of everyone’s history.

It is one of the great apocalyptic events that implode in our brains.

The day that I communed with Velasquez and Goya was not about the art: I found a particular position in Madrid’s Prado, where my eyes could simultaneously cross generations and centuries to caress Spanish art history.

Most often I catch a glimpse of architecture as in Nietzsche’s espying a side view glance:

It is a mere glimpse of something to follow: the glimpse you capture as you leave for another: you hope that what was essential to the moment, is essential to the capture: the synaptic connections that bring our heart and history (a history in nano seconds) into one focus.

I remember visiting the home of one of the father’s of photography: Nicéphore Niépce: It was in Charon-sur-Saône, France: What a rush of memory and history staggers the body but enlivens the spirits: You step into history like a surfer steps in liquid: awash with the pleasures of the past and the rush of the moment: The passion is alive in you: It is saying hello: if you don’t feel it then, your body might as well be cold.

Was I in the home of the the very first photograph ever made: possibly: I have always realized I wanted to be part of history: If this is where it began or even a second cousin, what a fabulous time to inhale all the microorganisms that have lived and died in this (now) musee.

Then the cavalcade of stars dance before your eyes: if photography’s history means nothing to you, so be it; but if it does, count the great lives whose DNA began here in France.

I am a romantic when the passion pushes me: but if not to connect here then to where.

To this day I remember exhaling seeing the Niépce with a glimpse into what would become my past.

I have entered the cathedrals of art and architecture to embody something bigger than I am: When did I realize that architecture is anthropomorphic? When did I first witness an edifice morphing from stone to skin and flesh and dreams? Was it in Charon-sur-Saône or was it to be in Rome’s The Galleria Borghese.

In both places I could feel below me the shattering shifting tectonic plates across continents: I stepped into not hallowed ground, not a place of worship but the home to the delirious ghosts of art history: “Wow” is just a word that appears as a bubble in the clouds.

Museum of Modern Art: a Caler over the steps

When I write these odes to places that have swayed my heart, I always hear the white asylum straight jacket snap me tight: The Borghese’ Caravaggio’s and the Bernini’s came to life: I knew I was where I needed to be: I captured a glimpse.

My mind does not register a single artist who reigns supreme: there is the experience of traveling across countries and continents to experience a glimpse: the moment you realize that you have been where others have been: But you saw something more: a living breathing anthropomorphic edifice that may be home to something more precious than the then or now;

Delirious with pleasures that are mine: I have caught a glimpse that is mine:

Even the “Moon’s eye” never embraces the entirety of our visual experience: but what a joy to merely share a glimpse from our time.

Architecture of Cities: New Cathedrals Part 2

February 08, 2024

My story has always been about the about the Moors and Romans. My story has always been about Charlton Heston and Kirk Douglas fighting the just fight: They fought side by side (albeit) in different films:

My hurried education:

Sophia Loren and Jean Simmons were my muses before I was old enough to know…

Cultural wars were beginning to say hello.

I look back in time and douse the years in calendars from yesterday and tomorrow.

What’s the difference where and how are minds amass time:

I had, one day completed the dystopian novel; A Canticle for Leibowitz when I realized I needed a hero to place the reset button in my mind: I needed to take the deep breath and cheer for heroic deeds. I am pretty certain I wouldn’t be making images of any kind if it wasn’t for El CID and Spartacus.

Herzog and de Meuron Parrish Art Museum: Water Mill New York

As you can see my childhood’s visual playgrounds to my professional endeavors was not too big of a leap: My life has been an attempt to make a cinematic narrative with each frame my camera sees: Not necessarily to tell an heroic story, but to certainly make photographs with every efforts I have in my body: My camera’s aperture opens, my mind makes a movie.

Everyday I find myself landing at my own caravan serai: It is a place in mind in spirit where I play in my mind the past and future passions for architecture. Somewhere in the distance I can hear the straight-jackets.

The calamity and dystopia A Canticle for Liebowitz played in my mind has somewhat vanished: Obviously youthful memories don’t die.The calamity of a dystopian world needed to be shaken from this youthful memory banks: I am well aware that the romance of epic battles and storied adventures influenced me to the hilt: But just maybe so did the cracker science fiction I saw in The Blob.

My memories don’t always correspond to the way I dream: But I find just satisfaction in the greater tales: What is the point in telling stories about architecture without mingling fantasies. The fantasies are much more present in my reality. I am not certain when the written word tickled my brain a bit: Facts and fictions have danced numerous tangos throughout my mind: Language and my visual appetite have become grand companions while adrift: Adrift hunting for the camera capture.

When I am with my camera, I am alone. When you are alone in the world, it is not what you know, it is about what you don’t know about the world. This is when you lean forward, lean as close as you can: To what may be the truth in photography: Not in what I may see but what I know I feel.

I have mapped out many approaches to photographing architecture: I have at times felt equally like Rommel and Patton. I have drawn maps across continents to the nth degree: I have tried to be practical crossing every line of longitude and latitude: Unfortunately I am an amalgamation of dozens of mammals in heat: My entire circuit system goes into overdrive as I near my intended capture. I wish I could master the laconic Sam Spade: But you need a certain amount of verve as you make your approach:

The Pritzker recipient Eduardo Souto de Moura dropped me off at the Pritzker recipient Alvaro Siza’s Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves: I knew these two giants of architecture are great friends: Eduardo thought enough of my stay in Porto to share what he referred to as his mentor and friends’ great accomplishment: For me entering was like entering a modern cathedral:

The mass of Renzo Piano enthusiasts referred to the intimate Beyeler Foundation almost as a cathedral of intimate prayer: Ernst Beyeler was very curious to see how I might capture this quiet collection.

Almost every architect I have met has had a voice in how I might interpret their creations:I realize the most about my eyes when my hand is held and pointed as if I was a Wirehaired Pointing Griffin: a bit shaggy and determined.

Alone and lost in my mind and on just about any map, is when my camera is at its best: I take pictures to find my way: I take pictures to find myself: There is always a shutter clicking when I hear the word “suddenly”. I have found what I have been looking for: Frank Gehry motioned forward: Richard Meier motioned forward: Both architects embraced the photograph that had not been taken before: This Madhatter has found his way: Not the road taken but the single frame that defined the significance of cross-crossing the globe for architecture.

Architecture of Cities: New Cathedrals

February 01, 2024

Palace of Legion of Honor: San Francisco

I remember inhaling a firestorm when I first landed in New York City. I remember every next morning I needed the hair of the dog: Not from too much alcohol but to savor my intoxication: I had a drunken fever: Tomorrow I will live some more.

Nothing measures up to the begging: gasping exhortations: is merely the internal self pleading:

There is no substitute for a lifeline: there is not a lifeline that grants a life that dreams in reality.

Dallas/Fort Worth Museum of Art; Architect Tadao Ando

Many people have traveled to more places and seen more than I have: For me it was this insatiable quest: I couldn’t be first somewhere I merely wanted to be anywhere.

The remnants of the firestorm left behind dreams not yet mannered: Dreams that I can point to: For one day that became more than ten thousand I dreamed I became the art world’s Albrecht Magnus: I thought to chronicle everything art in my twentieth-twentieth-first century art world.

The afternoon in Uzbekistan’s Bukhara was not a dream: I walked into the tiniest synagogue on this planet: there was a painting:

The morning in Saint-Petersburg’s Hermitage wasn’t extraordinary until I realized I was the only living walking eyes in the entire collection of galleries.

In Bukhara there was a mere masterpiece: In the Hermitage there were a thousand masters of the universe that left me gasping.

Rome’s Borghese Caravaggios were not mere entertainment: I heard my echoing footsteps: I saw Bernini’s dance the Watusi: For an afternoon I lived inside a fairy tale: I literally bowed to the greats as I exited into Rome’s summer furnace.

I stood alone frozen in Tokyo’s Modern Museum: The Samurai posed in European castles: The Japanese idols seemed so alone: But I was with them.

Klimt was alone in Vienna’s Leopold Museum: I sat on a bench with him: Neither of us moved.

The Prada’s Goya and Velasquez danced a pas de deux: I stood alone: I dreamed alone.

The places I inhabited for art in hindsight were merely a directive: These were places: fifty countries and thousands of creations/articles set aside their days for me to experience: I was alone.

An illusory caravan transported me across nations: It has been quite a ride.

I think the first part of my camera life was a means toward and end: The architectural cathedrals that were homes for art later caught my breath: it was the collection of edifices popping up in my mind like an opening sequence to Games of Thrones: That is what I remember most acutely. My days of rubbing my cheeks on the canvases of the Post Impressionist was coming to an end.

I realized I was standing naked in front of naked buildings A fantastical universe was staring into my eyes: my future was clear: I was given the tools and the heart to not only realize analog images of some of the greatest examples of centuries of architecture: But buildings that speak beyond art, and yet are art in my camera:

I see why I landed in New York so many years ago.

I remember Lina Bo Bardi in São Paulo: I remember the Maeght Fondation: I am begging to remember continents and buildings large and small: They suggest a vision that started seemingly after a dream that I haven’t had yet: The buildings were not blurry, but my memory of them is slightly blurred after an optical surgery: Maybe slits and slats prevent me from seeing what I need to see: The colors never seemed to be bright and emphatic like the dilated virile saturation following the optometrist touch.

After awhile I began to come to terms with myself: I began to see: I began to feel like a naked Buddy Bolden: My camera was playing sounds that only the Bayou could hear: That is when I began to retrace my steps: return to what I over abundantly and possibly unnecessarily bellow the “Cathedrals of Art”. That is where my visual education arose from.

I wanted to honor those moments: Now landing on continents, countries and cities made sense: It was about art, now it is the art of architecture:

Now I feel most comfortable like Being There’s Chauncey Gardiner: Tending to his garden is my life ahead tending to the photographs I need to make.

The Architecture of Cities: The Midwest

January 25, 2024

Peter Eisenman’s Wexner Center for the Arts: Ohio State, Columbus Ohio

Catnip: Catnip is one of the many pleasures that move me throughout my career: I find it in thee discovery of light: I find it in the adventures of landing on. New planets: I find it in the evolution of my work: I find it looking back at the many decades with a camera in hand: I find it in tomorrow.

I always wanted to feel like George Bowling in Orwells’ Coming up For Air: I wanted to see the canopy of trees and feel the air enroute to the south of France:

I wanted to sit in the Ferrari as the basketball player, Wilt Chamberlain raced one-hundred miles an hour through the night across country: He would regale me with his basketball and women conquests: I would feel the awe of America at night:

I wanted to be sitting alongside James Bond as he drove the French Atlantic coast after a night of clandestine activities and just a few martinis: The Bentley’s top down, the morning ocean spray alerted me to the pleasure of the endless life on the road.

I wanted to sit in the front seat between Thelma and Louise as their car was just about ready for lift off over the forever cliff: I wanted to experience the delirium.

It is what photographers get to do: dream about what they see, dream about dreams.

I was just about to land in what I refer to as O.E Rolvaag land; I for many years equated Giants in the Earth novel as my Midwest.

Some years ago I was driving alone on the road. A city boy pushing his car through America’s Midwest was part Stephen Kings’ Children of the Corn and part the essence of Americana: Worlds’ Fairs. It was a bit of humbling fun to make fun of what I didn’t know and what I may never know: The Midwest: My first professional foray into an American foreign land: I cannot remember the exact order, but I was zig zagging through Cincinnati, Dayton, Indianapolis, and cities in between before a two and a half hour rally drive from Fort Wayne Indiana to Columbus, Ohio.

Michael Graves Hanselmann House: Fort Wayne, Indiana

I was doused in catnip: every blink of an eye was a photograph: for a few seconds I was the photographer W.Eugene Smith shooting the portrait of the Country Doctor: He made his way through the tall grasses…But this is what catnip does, it stimulates your electrolytes, receptors.

I arrived in Fort Wayne Indiana to photograph Michael Graves “Hanselmann House for AIA Twenty-Five Year award:

The house was hidden amid a cluster of Sassafras, Pine and one Black Walnut tree.

I was alone in the shadows: Some may say it is special to have a house to photograph alone and alone: There are sights and sounds: There are the Children of the Corn and other psychological frights. I wondered how Bojangles might have navigated those initial steps: So I danced: Alone in the house I remembered that I had photographed more than half a dozen Graves works: Somehow this less imposing built house seemed the more important: putting history into perspective: award winning architecture is a reflection of a greater achievement: standing the test of time.

My efforts produced more frames, but also a concentration that might only be best understood as an homage to the architect.

So as I drove off from Fort Wayne to Columbus Ohio I wondered why so many fabulous architects made something brilliant in the Midwest: The Midwest was their special studio. Oddly China became a similar platform for the best of a certain pedigree of architects: the platform to be the best of what they could be.

While alone on the road there is a certain sound of music that you can’t hear. You know it adds speed to the propeller s that thrust you along the roads:the back roads: and the roads you inevitably get lost on: To be or not to be: I am lost, do I call for help: I am lost do I seek out something new: The pleasures of the music that you cannot hear makes me dance.

I arrived in Columbus, Ohio: My mind was filled with a card catalog of the “Prairie Writers”. My mind was aloft in the country fields watching time. I had pulled up to the gas station: It was also part five and dime and hardware store. While my gas tank was being filled I went in to get some nourishment of various importance.

I noticed a giant window attached to a local ice cream parlor. It was like looking into a Pee Wee Herman rehearsal: Lollipop colors as far as the eyes could see: A rotund couple wearing matching candy colored “tees”. Their ice cream cones were subject to some sort of abuse.

I made my way to Ohio State’s Wexner Center for the Arts. It was designed by Peter Eisenman.

Not a soul to be seen. I have never seen people in any of the pictures by others. It made me feel as if this is what is meant by the prairie lands: the expanse and the beauty of America laid out for my eyes: Standing in the midst of the open, is a new architectural church: I am not a critic, so I never offer an opinion on such things: Say what you will about the quietude of being alone with your thoughts: The music still plays on: Snippety-snap-snap. What I believed to be a contemporary moment in in the Midwest’ bucolic bliss.

If the Midwest had an ocean near by, I would live somewhere near by.

The Architecture of Cities: The Viennese Waltz

January 18, 2024

I write to remember that I have a memory. My memories are what I remember.

The things I have seen, fade into black. My mind is triggered: I play a lonesome game of charades to remember yesterday: A name or place are offered: My mind becomes unabridged and open to past dreams.

I am actually riding this overnight car having no recollection from where I have been. I had no processed film to analyze: I just had an empty data bank from yesterday.

I tried to retrace my steps: I know I had spent a London morning with the architect Richard Rogers: I know I had spent a nano second with Rotterdam’s Rem Koolhaas: My time in Paris was spent partially with Dominique Perrault: At one moment I had photographed Jean Nouvel’s Fondation Cartier: I remember looking at Sarah Moons’ photography exhibition. A miasma of names and places has blinded my sight and everything in my mind: I celebrate and blame the hundreds of architects who have opened their doors for my camera: The hundreds of architects who have pointed me towards what structures are by them and for us: Everyday my camera turns a corner: Everyday this world of architecture opens up to new vistas and experiences: My train ferries along: the darkness blackens. It like being enrapt in a Space Shuttle launch without a control panel: The natural darkness suggests light is near: I am ignorant of outer space’s constellation of stars: I begin to exit the trains’ tunnel: the darkness has still blinds me: I may be glimpsing the North Star or the Austrian Neuschwanstein Castle silhouettes of spires: I am somewhere: Maybe there is a bit of Hipparchus in me: The stars prompted me to see darkness fading into light: So much delirium: so much fantasia: are we in Disneyland or is that really The Third Man’s Orson Welles. We pull up to the Vienna Hauptbahnhof: the main railway hub.

Oh Vienna:

The opportunity to photograph Austrias’ Hans Hollein and Wolf Prix allowed my mind to visit with some of my favorite ghosts: I paid my respects to the sounds of Mozart: I laid my eyes on some delicious Klimts: I listened to what Freud might have suggested as peregrine feathers accompanied me around the maypole: My first maypole was put upon me somewhere between the ages of six and twelve: I dance to different tunes today: I was clearly in step with Viennese eyes upon me: If my memory serves: From where Hans Hollein’s Haas-Haus to Wolf Prix’s Gasometer I danced: The names of streets gave me pause, gave me pleasure: The five miles distance seemed to last a few minutes on foot: I walked more than an hour: I just imagined a world not mine.

The aesthetic that lives in my eyes never knows what to make of the word important: I see later in history that sometimes the built structure may or may not be the best or most important of what the architect has to offer: Yet there is still a moment for the architect that the said building, portrays powerful significance. Their reputations prominently established: There is still or always: ”but what do people think”.

I respect the purpose of what is built: I respect the agenda for what the architect has accomplished:“Snippety-snap-snap”, my eyes capture something: Something certainly more important for me than the architect.The music plays, history and modernity happily clash: To this day I am still uncertain about what Austrians prefer: Modernity and history are not merely a clash of styles but a meeting of the souls: The comforts of what we knew the feisty manner of what may be: The dance is for me in Vienna: It is a ballroom of chance discoveries and beautiful serendipitous thrills: It is Vienna.

The Architecture of Cities: The World

January 11, 2024

Oscar Niemeyer

I landed In Rio one afternoon: My dreams became my photographs: My photographs reflect my imaginations: Dream with me. If you have ever heard of Brazil most likely the sounds of the Amazon forest, the musical timbre that might be Rio de Janeiro might have come to mind.

There is a well founded mystique about Rio de Janeiro: It is exotic.

Rio may not adjoin the Amazon rainforest: But you might imagine hearing the dissonant sounds of the black panther: the vocal warbling from the white throated toucan: the solitary hiss of the green anaconda: The thirteen-hundred fowls: And more inexhaustible gatherings of nature’s wonders waiting to never be discovered: Two and a half million miles tickle our fancy, trigger our imaginations.

The sounds of the rainforest live in the streets: There is the darkness of the streets that seem to live in bright lights: There are nightmares and adventures that fly about: Music is not merely a sound in Rio: Music is bound to the way movement is seen: Ten million or more move to an unconscious rhythm: You merely have to trust the music that moves a nation: It belongs to them and nowhere else.

There is a rage that consumes me: What may I miss in life makes me feel as if a firestorm tears through my neurowaves: To miss opportunities in my photography frightens me. It is as if the civility of my mind wanes: I don’t fear death I fear the missed opportunities, the missed moments that my camera needs to see before I can no longer see. I dream within the rage daily.

When you live in a city the camera contemplates the perceptible nuances of architecture: When you travel to a city, one tends to conquer too much too fast: I had intended to capture in one frame Brazil’s Rio de Janeiro architectural past and present. I considered my almost half century of making pictures and realized just maybe it was a good idea to imagine Rio’s architecture as a pas de deux: a dance between what the camera sees and what the light shares: The entire idea of Rio seemed to reveal itself as a kaleidoscopic projection. My eyes circled the Brazilian universe as if I was “The Little Prince”: Every glimpse of what was new to my eyes was significant: Then the helicopter landed.

Movies have influenced the way I see for my entire career: It seems only appropriate that the idea of helicopter allowed my mind to trace my dreams back to Apocalypse Now: For a few seconds I could be at the frontlines of battle and break for a “smoke” and surfing waves.

But this transportation organized by the Mayor of Rio was to fly me a few tours around “Christ the Redeemer”: the notorious favela City of God: and across to the development of architect Christian Portzamparc’s Music Center: The Atlantic Ocean in front of the famed Copacabana:

If you could imagine this child inside of me screaming “Zoom, please zoom”, then you will know how excited I was to fly as if I was at war and a bounty of a million dreams coming together to celebrate Neil Armstrong’s “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”.

The rest of day was left for me to navigate tomorrow: Four stops: Three buildings and one man.

The Niteroi Contemporary Museum: Oscar Niemeyer: His Copacabana home and his Casa das Canoas.

I hear one word from my mind the next morning: “Run”.

Is there an innocence in me? I travel to foreign destinations: Photograph what might be historically memorable: challenge my own perceptions of what a photograph can be and what the world’s perceptions are.

So I begin, so I begin to capture:

The soft morning light in Niteori is letting me know I have minutes to make something that measures up: The afternoon will be nearing twilight when I will arrive as Das Canoas:

There is an in between: the architect Oscar Niemeyer will be waiting for me.

I could write an entire essay about this little man who thrilled a universe of architects: He left behind a legacy that such fabulous architects like Zaha Hadid and Ma Yasong have wrapped their heads around it. He was one of the century’s great artists.: He greeted me with open hands, I felt embraced, not me, but my heart.

My camera has spoken to a century of voices: a century of art and architecture. To this day I think that I was compelled, almost an essential quotient of my dreams to meet Oscar Niemeyer: The architecture may remain, but the person will vanish.

The Architecture of Cities: The World

January 04, 2024

#Architect Thomas Phifer #NorthCarolina Museum of Art

Between two buildings with one hour to shoot

One morning I flew down to Raleigh, North Carolina: I was planning on photographing two buildings for a new book. I imagined Raleigh as one might imagine a foreign country: Silly fun to consider what I may see of Sir Walter Raleigh, Queen Elizabeth, Southern politics and the historic Carolina basketball programs all in one breath. I have been less and more ridiculous at times.

Discovery is an experience that should only be viewed in a dream. That is the best way to remember it for a lifetime.

The “Devils Tower” is such an experience. A sacred place where light rests in your mind: You merely pop your head atop the “Butte” and peek below to see what is inside: It might be a deliverance of magic: Aladdin’s lamp is a similar place: But the lamp is not real, and your dreams are. Take an existential leap. You never know what you might discover.

When I landed in Raleigh, I heard the pitter-patter: It is a sign that the time is near: time is evolving: light is evolving: It is time to facilitate those electrolytes: It is time to make some pictures.

The sun’s light is one of photography’s greatest weapons: Utilizing all of photography’s tools to know where the light will be and catch a glimpse is essential: The sundial is possibly an alternative tool. Though I cannot imagine watching the seemingly slow movements of a sundial while preparing to make a photograph: My heart would fail: I merely need to know where to be and when:

Certainly the invention of the sundial at one point changed the way all souls lived their lives: But for this photographer run and dance are the two words that manifests internally who I am and what I need to do:

The distance between where I am and where I need to be: I look to the skies and see what the sundial cannot explain: There will be sun, and there will be cloud cover: But when.

The well paid taxi driver was accelerating quite handsomely between my two destinations: I was imagining the distance as the crow would fly: I was dreaming under miles of of oak tree canopies. Twelve minutes separated two sets of photographs: I had a little more than an hour to make something credible.

Architect: #Snohetta James Hunt Library Raleigh North Carolina

What transpires between the two destinations is what I refer to as one example of the science of photography. I see the sun illuminating one building: I see cloud covering hindering my approach to another. Yes the hills, mountains, oceans’ currents and the birds fluttering wing’s might be an acceptable blame. Maybe I could blame the one-hundred and eighteen elements of the periodic table. That may or may not be true: the interesting part is that my mind is afire and the taxi driver is loving it: He knows well the twelve minutes between destinations, but I still rage “drive faster”.

The great ice hockey player Wayne Gretzky said: “You need to shoot and never stop”. He is referring to scoring goals. There is some truth in that: There is a simpler truth in architectural photography: A photographer interprets the truth: There is only one snap that matters

If you might imagine the story of the four orcas: Four orcas circling in tandem an iceberg: Fear was their greatest weapon: the arctic seal could only espy the inevitable: The whale’s meal: The inevitable is such an enriching part of my imaginations journey: The inevitable is not a thousand shots to capture one moment: The inevitable is a mere one snap: It is the image where you celebrate what is behind door number one, two and three: The photograph is made: what happened before, what may have happened after: Only the orcas and seal know.

I was photographing the James B. Hunt Library by the architectural firm, Snohetta. I was also photographing Thomas Phifer’s North Carolina Museum of Art.

I wondered where the light will land: I wondered how long will the lazy cloud cover would alter my needs. If the cumulus clouds holds their sway for too long the objective beauty may be missed.

According to the weather report in Raleigh North Carolina: Today’s weather will not be like yesterday, and tomorrow will not be like today. Now is my time.

Most people who have witnessed me making photographs have wondered why I dance while making pictures: the buildings are not moving, why is the photographer: The simple answer is that the light moves and the lens refuses to see the picture that was framed a fraction of a second before: so we move: We being me and my camera: we move to not a particular sound but to the light the camera sees. Both projects had me running and dancing: I saw what I needed to see.

When the taxi driver drove me back to the airport, he cautiously asked me if I had a successful trip.

I told him that for one day, I saw what my camera saw was the best moment to go “snippety-snap-snap”.

There might be a thousand shots on goal to take as Wayne Gretzky attests to: But the framing of a single photography moment is what I live for: I live in my imagination: I dream about lives to live: I wish I could be the little boy who languidly draws pictures of dinosaurs or other imaginary moments:

If I don’t get up and run, I will miss the light.

Thomas Phifer’s North Carolina Museum of Art: Raleigh North Carolina

The Architecture of Cities: The World Chasing the Light

December 28, 2023

One day a prismatic pageantry of ghosts with like minded souls stood at the threshold.

There was this photographer and the sway of Sir Norman Foster’s London Millennium Bridge.

There was a nuanced wall of one-thousand buildings from a century of British architectural design.

Dreams mingled with my realities: Before I could cross the threshold I had to understand how to navigate a history of fantasies: Standing upright as if to cascade across nations: The one-hundred foot wave hailing from Nazaré was both forbidding and foreboding: I watched as it seemed to be cresting inhabited by one-thousand eyes of Lampreys and Cods.

If I may inhabit James Thurber’s mind for one minute: in my eyes his “Mitty” my “Mitty” might have a darker disposition. In the most minute manner Thurber realized what I have grown to embrace: my dreams become my realities. I had to get by the encumbrance of this wall, this wave in order to succeed.

Every year I read the English Romantic, Charles Lamb’s “New Year’s Eve”. It is the same as the year before: The words become more familiar: Like Lamb’s poem my world remains the same. My days become more familiar: I dream that I battle everyday to see something new: but in a new light:

One day I listened to Yusuf Lateef’s “Spartacus: Yusef Lateef - Love Theme From Spartacus - YouTube It reminds me that I enter each city not with the power of Spartacus’ army but with hidden dreams and the powers to discover great things.

Most days when I enter a new city or one revisited: London, Paris, Tokyo, Mexico, Barcelona or…

I feel like a hamster challenging life’s experiences: avec a hamster wheel: Round and round I go: I am lost in my mind and lost on every path I walk: The scariest part of my life as a photographer is that there is not a single map nor navigational system that can lead me to where I need to be: I feel my way through streets that have so many curves and mis-directions it is as if I am accompanied by a mere white cane: Lost and lost again: But my god, the things not on the itinerary that I have discovered: The streets to observe, the comforts that I know: A pub, a cafe, a street corner, the dress and attire of a massive amount of people: It will get me through my day.

There is a windfall from my idiosyncratic imaginations and dreams: some days may deliver the brilliance of a photograph I may have made: The windfall maybe the tenor of a city I have discovered: The city I have known and not known: The greatest windfall may be to lose ones’ mind on real and imaginary streets: At this point it is only normal you might imagine an hysterical laugh that would shake Krakatoa before there was a Krakatoa.

I have never understood how photographers’ live thinking about the mechanical when our reality lives in our minds as a dream. There is always Game of Thrones’ “Winterfell” to keep one’s mind focused: The wall, the fortress that needs to be climbed to capture what the camera needs to see: To go beyond the moment and cross the threshold: to be present: “snippety-snap-snap”.

When I have crossed the imaginary bridge from let us say the Tate Modern to Saint Paul’s and the Festival Gardens where I am intended to be: I will stand: I will “twitch”: I have arrived.

I am not a warrior, I am not a ”grunt” nor am I a sophisticated flâneur: I am merely a chaser: I chase the one structure: I may capture the single light that differentiates from all others.

The Capture: London’s #HeronTower #KohnPedersenFox

The Architecture of Cities: The World

December 21, 2023

Chasing the Light: Chasing History

One day many years ago I was strolling as if I was a ghost among the throngs of Fifth Avenue holiday revelers. My left eye caught a glimpse of something sparkling. Millions of people made noise: I scampered across the avenue. I wanted to see the source of the glint in my left eye.

I felt naked: My camera draped over my neck: I walked tippy-toe as if along the Northern Cape Province in Kimberley, South Africa. I imagined I spotted The Millennium Star.

That twilight evening I was younger than I am today: my youthful exuberance believed I had discovered something I needed to capture.

I pressed, I urged myself to make this photograph before it vanished in history’s memory.

It felt as if I was on a safari: I heard something in the bushes: I saw the sparkle of my prey. My camera moved to capture what initially was a glint: In the moment the blue was dazzling.

I work very hard to make a photograph. Sometimes I will hear the needs of the client: Sometimes I will hear my own aesthetics: Whatever it may be, I prowl around my intended capture until I feel there remains one solution:”Snippety-Snap-Snap”.

Architect Toyo Ito:: Hotel Santos Porta Fira in Barcelona

Sometimes I may overwork an idea and get caught in Copernicus’s Epicycle: circling around the intended shot so many times, I can hear the fear of losing the light into the darkness: What an unfathomable risk that would be.

I cannot allow the burden of making a successful shot sway my choices: I just need to be alone in my mind: to dance in the quiet of my mind: Then I must shoot:

If I allow myself to dance: If I feel the quietude: The moment will relax: The picture will become part of the dream I imagined.

I remember one day in the Museum of Modern Art. On one wall there was Picasso’s “Guernica”. On the other side of the wall was Rousseau’s “The Sleeping Gypsy”.

I scanned the rooms looking for security guards. Then I secretly touched the Picasso and the Rousseau.

That very moment was so electrifying that I realized the rest of my life would be about the moments in my eyes:

I began to imagine what it might feel like to sneak a touch of the world’s great art> I wondered what an emotional charge it could be to caress the best the world has to offer.

I turned my energies to architecture: I realized my eyes had to capture for my own personal history what might be the most exciting architecture.

My mind toured the globe: My mind toured continents, countries and cities: Not only would I experience the rise and fall of cultures, but my camera would have a compelling conversation:

My camera would capture Niemeyer, Hadid, Gehry, Kahn, Wright and hundreds more> My camera would through my pictures listen to their conversations: It is my camera that needs to capture what might be great.

I could be the whale that sings, breathes and swallows all of the krill that swim the seven seas: Imagine the stories that I could tell: the adventures I might experience: The one day, one moment that my camera might see.

My camera is like the jeweler who looks through his lupe and identifies a diamond’s vein of blue. My camera is the one who gasps, “Aha”. My camera is the one who makes sense of my days as a photographer.

It is my heart that shakes…It is my heart that shakes as I race to capture the light before it turns into the darkness.

The Architecture of Cities: The World

December 14, 2023

#FranklloydWright Beth Sholom Congregation Elkins Park Pennsylvania

Dreams of Architecture’s Silence: “Shhh”

I have been a nine year old bright eyed with wonderment ten separate days in my life: They were days that were filled with surprises and dreams.

When I turned ten years old I remember seeing eighteen orcas body surfing naked in an ocean of paradise. The same waves were also inhabited by seventeen mermaids rapturously shimmering naked from the waist up.

I knew then that if I prayed loudly I would see things that might never be seen again. I have never prayed: My visual compass not my moral compass has kindled a fire in places where a prayer or two might have been heard. You might never know what they will mean until the light says hello.

Kenzo Tange Architecht St. Mary’s Cathedral Tokyo, Japan

My imagination routinely discovers places that no longer exist. My camera has discovered ten- thousand sacred moments.

Nearly one-million visitors enter Mecca each year. The sounds I will never hear live in the moment where all bodies bend the knee in prayer. The volume might sound like waves pounding in the Sea of Cortez: But how many people have heard that crush.

When I attempt to capture religions’ architecture priests and rabbis have a need to show me how to see their places of worship. They place their arms around me instruct me where and how to look. My interests are not theirs. I see the sounds that only I can hear.

My ideas behind many of my pictures continually remind me of the silent genius that was Charlie Chaplin: The sounds live muted on film before your eyes: their stories are in your eyes: and they becomes my pictures.

I own my personal dreams: a place to worship within a dream: I am cozied up against the girth of a nine-hundred pound Grizzly Bear: We lean against a tree like two birds counting trees in the forest: Our eyes stalk the Coho Salmon as they migrate upstream to spawn in May and after: We watch a sleuth of bears: they spend the mornings and parts of the afternoon catching and missing the silvery and red meal to be. I am rooting for the fish to escape capture: the “grizzly” is for the other side…and so it goes: The day nears the night and my Grizzly ends his afternoon with a mash of caught salmon.

I have never merely photographed a building: I am never merely communing with the spectacular geniuses I have met and dreamed of meeting: The minds of Oscar Niemeyer, Zaha Hadid and Frank Lloyd Wright were brilliant creators: When I stand in front of the built community I imagine mingling within their dreams: Dreaming about what may be.

When I land in a city with a mission at hand, I most often hear a metronome on steroids atop of a piano. The synchronized feverish pitch of the white natural C8 push me towards speeds I have only imagined:

I most always never walk: Funny but true: when the idea mounts in my mind what I need to do: my mind says run: My body looks around and says “ok, this is me running”. Faster and faster I run. I have never not run to my destination: The visual consequences could dampen the heart and mind: Imagining if you didn’t arrive soon enough to see the intended photograph: You never want to hear your mind scream “oops, I missed it”.

Antoni Gaudi. La Sagrada Familia. Barcelona, Spain

The cities of the world I have seen for architecture, have offered and unveiling of the built homes of prayer: I ran to the synagogue in Florence: I ran to and through the blistering heat that surrounds Agra’s Taj Mahal: I ran straight into the BLUE Mosque of Istanbul: I ran across cemeteries in Samarkand to see the sacred Jewish place of worship: I ran through fields of grass to see the light atop Frank Lloyd Wright church in Pennsylvania.

When I landed in Yusuhara, Japan I realized more than at any time I had stepped into the light and darkness of religions: I witnessed the innocent intimacy of a commoner’s light and darkness: I know I have seen monuments: I know I have seen what is perceived as the grandest models of religions architecture:

I imagine there was a reckoning when I stood face to face with the grandest designs that have weakened hearts and minds for even a few seconds or many millenniums.

But in this tiny village, I imagined I saw the quietude of sound: This tiny village stood with great pride but with little else noticeable beyond the geography: There was no sound to be heard just the silence to be seen.

The Architecture of Cities: The World

December 07, 2023

The Architecture of Cities: The World

The old vs. the new:

I sat perched like a naked rabid Balinese Macaques monkey wrapped and buckled in a straitjacket: Arms waist tied behind my back: Legs crossed: I sat on an empty road between here and there: I smiled: I had a free pass to see the world pass before my eyes. The twilight sun had just a few more minutes before the night. I knew which direction I faced but my story took me north and south.

I have always felt that to make the photograph that needs to be made you need to be willing to stop traffic to get wherever that may be. There is little or no traffic at fifty floors sky high in New York City: If I dreamed a bit harder I might see cinema’s “Sci-fi” taxis from “The Fifth Element“.

My photography has been rooted in some promising factors over the years: I glorify beautiful architecture: I try and tell a beautiful story about architecture in its entirety: I try not to only speak to the footprint of any structure, but to the inhabitants of aforementioned as well. I believe in architecture’s past and present. I know the various eras commune in some sort of conversation.

I discovered photographing the construction and the finished Renzo Piano New York Times newest iteration as an opportunity to have the city speak to me and my camera speak to what it saw.

The previous New York Times across the street from Renzo Piano’s Tower

My arsenal was and is very simple: Before there were drones and A.I. there was merely a boy with a camera in each hand. I honed my skills with simplicity as my agenda: Even as I rose to heights atop Rio’s Jesus, Tokyo’s Mori, London’s Shard and almost anything Dubai: what remained were two cameras of choice.

My mind never seems to acclimatize, but my feverish thrill of resorting to an artificial mountaintop to review the world at hand always puts me back in touch with my inner Macaques: Their mischief and playfulness to this day animates my brain.

For the powers that be, I had to promise to be safe as safety would allow on the highest peak of the New York Times.

Certainly nobody knew I had aside from one-hundred photographs, I had one that was my secret: To make the photograph that needed to be made.

The four corners of the building were cordoned off. When not a soul was looking, the flattened rooftop called to my heart.

I stepped over the ropes: I began my descent: I have always dreamt of flying: not free falling which I have done: but expanded wings and a wish:

I braced my body as my upper torso with a Nikon in one hand and a Pentax in the other leaned north and downward: The cameras were sort of my fulcrum if a lift need be.

A melange of new and old: Looking north on Madison Avenue in NYC

I wasn’t attempting a Tom Cruise at full throttle down the “Burj, Khalifa”. I merely wanted to lean and see the old New York Times that this “tower” was replacing. I wanted my camera to see the passing of a bit of architectural history: I also wanted to measure the past with the present.

Yes there is some sort of thrill to be sans harness as the body in shadows is draped along the side of this new tower.There is a bit of Houdini in the air: There is magic to be had.

I Leaned north a bit more: It almost sounds like a poem?

The only thing between my life and death was hope.

My knees held tight to the cement:

My quads cushioned my mind:

The length of my arms held the camera in a sort of “Gumby”stretch:

For visual reference it was sort of like the mountainside scene in “North by Northwest”.

Eva Marie Saint and Cary Grant on a faux Mount Rushmore: Gravel falling but nobody falling.

It was a maneuver I had dreamed about: not about dying but getting to where I needed to be.

If I fell?

When I heard the snap: I realized it could have been my shutter reverberating through midtown architecture canyons:

Afloat for the last time. In real time I was one of those floating Chagall characters: Fragility reigned: The entire notion of reality had vanished: I steadied for a click: My right hand found solid ground: I placed my camera atop the fifty-something floor.

I pushed.

I heard a voice: from the position Jesus or his Father would call from: Like an hallucination from another time: Monkeys were dancing around my head:

I heard “what the !!%#!!!”. I straightened:I could only feel my heart: I knew several potions of elixirs would be saving me following my photography exercise.

How can I tell anyone that I didn’t mean to almost die for a snap:

But then,; What an “effing” view.

I remember going down in the construction workers elevator: Something I had done a number of times.

Nobody spoke to me until we landed: like astronauts entering the atmosphere: Like a Capsule landing at sea, or a Shuttle landing in the desert. We waited for the doors to be popped open.
“Exhilarating”: I said: Or something to that affect:

There is something compelling when you realize you skirted tragedy with the utmost enjoyment:

There is a pause: your own history paces before your eyes: You gaze into what might be your history’s future: Then you finally ask yourself what you might see if you were perched above the earth: I know I can hear Vincent Prices’ laugh from the darkness in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”.

The Architecture of Cities: The World

November 30, 2023

The Architecture of Cities: The World

The Darwin Centre: Architect: C.F. Moller #CFMOLLER London, England

THE PERCH

I was perched somewhere between Montmartre’s Sacré-Coeur and the Eiffel Tower.

I sat alone on a Travertine limestone bench.

I did have one companion: the silence of myself.

There is always a perch: There is not a bird in the universe that would deny me my perspectives from this perch.

I have repeated this routine in many cities (Paris, Rio, Sao Paulo,Tokyo and …): I realize that from the perch I can define my prey: The way I will see:

My routine begins the same way: Imagine a chain reaction that has a pleasurable result:I imagine I can see from this perch in front of Sacré-Coeur, pass the Eiffel Tower all the way to the bottom depths of the Mariana Trenches.

Chowdhury’s Gulshan Society Mosque: Dhaka Bangladesh

I am allowed to share the power of my determination: I am allowed to share the depth of my imagination: I understand my future: I understand what I have not yet photographed and understand how much longer I need to stay alive to greet my goals.

I sit on my Travertine bench between my church, my tower and my trenches. I realize that each day, each march begins the same way: I find that my eyes are mimicking a brief optical aphasia. From there, there are a community of vaporous mists engulfing my mind’s eyes: Before my eyes focus, I almost always see misty colored vapors: my eyes finally arrive focused: A fresh place, perched: in this case above Paris.

The astronaut John Glenn once said the shapes and colors of the earth changed after each orbit. His eyes cuddled the seven seas and the seven continents. He looked with excited anticipation how his earth would change with every revolution on the axis.

I too have noticed that each day I “snap” at a new building or within a new city there is a shift of color a shift in personality: So many shapes so many people to artfully grapple with: “oh the pleasures of the changing landscape”: “Oh the pleasures of my dance among my whales”.

When my eyes are truly focused I am often reminded of others: places where my eyes grew like pleasurable saucers: The photographer Anne Brigman’s model naked in a fairy landscape while kneeling and pressing against a crystal globe (“The Bubble”): to pretend you see the world through a silvery bubble, to be a faux god for seconds: Nakedness is not an option. But to see my architecture through an imagined bubble as if I rest my eyes with the gods? What a thrill!

I snap. My dreamscape becomes real. I move on.

While imagining the lovely sinking feel in among the shadows surrounding depths of the Mariana’s Trenches: I found illustrative companionship from the photographs of František Drtikol: His (“Composition”) shapes and shadows were also dreamscapes that dramatized not merely what I was snapping at but how to see the shadows as accents in photography: recognize shapes, shadows and accents in architecture.

Artists Brigman and Drtikol’s styles introduced my eyes to ideas and ways of approaching not the architecture itself but the approach. Everyday I am reminded of John Glenn swooning over earth’s unique orbit. It is a reminder that while perched above cities and nations the view may change as the light of the day will change: as with fresh eyes, you identify and gravitate towards your bounty: The architecture of cities the architecture at hand that needs to be recorded.

My eyes finally sharpened: I add part of my witches brew: I discover my dalliances with Brigman and Drtikol sometimes marry the faux colors of Maxfield Parrish: I remember sitting at the St Regis’ King Cole Bar: A martini in hand and noise disappearing into the shadows behind me: The artist’ colors so rich and voluminous. I felt one day they would find a way into my work or into my dreams: From this perch or any other I utilized the artist’ efforts and colors. It is so tempting to take the credit for the ideas I present in analog or digital: But to acknowledge where some ideas come from is rewarding. I can hear myself define the truths in my photography and the reality that sits before the camera in architecture.

My thoughts are framed: inspirations are aglow: My influences are patterned by my convictions to entertain: to tell a story about architecture and its design.

The Architecture of Cities: The World

November 23, 2023

The Architecture of Cities: The World

Shenzhen Airport detail : Architect Fuksas

Truth in fiction:

Everyday I have a recurring dream: Sounds vanish: There is an image hiding in plain sight. I haven’t seen it yet, but it is there.

I was standing somewhere: I needed to cross a meadow: Ice appeared at first glance: My eyes embraced what felt like the entire Arctic Tundra. Maybe five-hundred yards of six-foot high fresh snow actually spanned before me: I needed to arrive at the other end:

I began my march. It didn’t feel like a death march: It felt like an adventure: Once I cross this natural obstacle, I will be able to make the image.

It is the manner in which I make all of my photographs that need to be made: There is a single moment that needs to be captured. I must get to where I need to be: But at what cost? All cost.

I was armed with a camera in each hand. My body moved through what I heard was slush: But felt more like a field of diamonds made of ice.

My pace in my heart quickened, but my legs began to struggle: The cameras: (Pentax 6x7 and Nikon) were held high in each hand: It could be misconstrued that I was surrendering: But in fact I was on the attack.

The high altitude began to take its toll. I was slowing in each step until the freeze gripped me like an Anaconda: The squeeze was a grip: I heard the death knell: I could no longer move: All of the vocals you hear yourself seemingly make while you are begging for help: All of the sounds you do not hear and not a single ear is within range: All of the colors that are frozen in view: You cannot move and you may die: The irony is that, I have always dreamed about dying alone and yet alone: I stood sculpted within natures’ finest moment: I know I will die! I merely needed a fraction of a second. If could get where I needed to be…

I recalled my photography sessions in the Nature Conservancy’s Reptile Pavillon: I made daily visits to stroke the neck of the largest Reticulated Python in captivity. The director showed me a picture of himself: His entire body was adorned with an Anacondas ribbons of green scales. Nearly five-hundred pounds gripped the man to near death. Houdini 101: When the Anaconda squeezes you until you are almost asphyxiated, you flex your muscles and the snake will no longer have the power to squeeze: It will have exhausted its entire girth. You will have created a space to “slither” out and escape.

So I began to flex within the ice: I began to create small steps: I screamed for help: But even in the face of certain death there is humor: I felt like an Orangutan without teeth begging for “Sole Meunière”.

I could still feel the aches of nature’s iceman grip me like the Anaconda with certain death ahead. I imagined my doppelgänger’s smile (the toothless Orangutan) in view. I was nearing where I needed to be: I recall like a cartoon’s animated bubble:: “stories hold the attention of the reader when the larger story is about the inevitably of death: “Tolkien”.

The ears have it: When I began to photograph architecture I had already had more than one-thousand hours of indirect/direct mentoring from dozens of architectural giants: Oscar Niemeyer, Frank Gehry, Richard Rogers, Hans Hollein, Zaha Hadid, Isozaki, Kengo Kuma and more shared with me their influences:

Mentoring is a profound word: When the influencers share not only their dreams and pasts, but also their tears of failures and successes. I feel a better way of walking towards the photographs I need to make: I can feel my strides: I can dance: not a dance about success but conviction.

I chose my own path. What remains, what lives in every image is an assemblage of dreams and aspirations:

I have grown to realize that through the canvases of cities and landscapes I have never been alone: I have had every architects conversation taped across my eyes.

How else could I thrive in a world amongst millions who were recording architecture if I couldn’t see the way the significant figures and their ghosts from architectures twentieth century past revealed in the world we live in.

Now I stand alone. I am still listening for what the shot may be. I hear the brilliance of The Rolling Stones: Merry Clayton’s careening deep feverish voice sings ( I know out of context) “It is just a shot away”.

I have made it: I snap

The Architecture of Cities: The World

November 16, 2023

The Architecture of Cities: The World

My mind listened to Esophageal whispers in surround sound: I could feel a bit of faint as the Komodo Dragon’s breath caressed my ears: I looked across the Atlantic Ocean: The Blue Whale waded near the unsuspecting coastline. The whales’ tongue bridged the coastline to discoveries yet to be seen. I peek at my life as an adventure in paradise. It cripples my heart, my mind to imagine dreams and nightmares my eyes may never see in paradise.

I dream about my photography in broad strokes: Think Spartacus, Lawrence of Arabia, The Godfather, 1980’s Blade Runner, and so many more.

These great dramatic movies are married to an amalgamation of narratives, cinematography and nuanced portrayals. The grand cinematic features are quite beautifully manipulative: The manipulation is harmless play: It is what movies are about.

Now consider my struggles with a single frame: a single snap from my camera is meant to represent an entire movie: Yes absurd. But is why I dream as a movie maker with broad strokes: I want an entire world to live in my fractions, the camera’s fractions of a second: Impossible.

Movies’ interludes/intermissions: a break in the action to allow you to stretch your legs and allow for a new flow of oxygen that will refresh and heighten your senses. It is actually quite a brilliant manipulation of the sensory perceptions: The mind comes alive: the eyes brighten to the expected but continuing storyline:

Allow for misdirections: misdirections occur during the interludes: A spoken word: A sudden burst of light from an unknown source: A shot of whiskey: a cup of coffee: I find myself mining new ideas while spinning in place, before I return to my movie: my intended photograph. I am suddenly and acutely aware of fresh thoughts, new considerations.

One day I was standing upright in the claustrophobia of the São Paulo thousands. The Pritzker architect Paulo Mendes nudged me to “look up” at an Oscar Niemeyer. The next day “Mendes” nudged me again to look up at a Lina Bo Bardi designed building.

Paulo Mendes, knowingly or not was my pilot: He was forcing my eyes to absorb more than just his buildings I was making pictures of: He was suggesting that I take in all of São Paulo: to make a single frame, it was necessary to behold an entire city and an entire idea in one frame. “Mendes” was reconditioning my eyes to capture “more”: He was educating me.

Rem Koolhaas; New Court London Headquarters for Rothschild Bank

Cinema does something very similar: The Director lays out a story but he/she are also directing your eyes to see in a certain way: to absorb more to learn more than a simple narrative: When you return from the interlude/intermission your mind has had time to reconsider everything to that point: You gather those thoughts with fresh eyes and suddenly there is a “Yowza”: your mind moves forward with a fresh appreciation: A heightened anticipation for whatever adventure lies ahead.

A cinema adventure may be two to three hours: my world is revealed in fractions of a second: But it is my goal to tether my entire world on to those frames made in fractions.

What is the point of looking across landscapes and cityscapes if you don’t wonder where your dreams allow you to go. When you free your mind to go places and take pictures you have not seen before: what a “Yowza” factor your life becomes.

The Architecture of Cities: The World

November 09, 2023

#Petersenautomobilemuseum Los Angeles designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox

The Architecture of Cities: The World

The beautiful dance: The beautiful dance: It is something that comes to mind whenever I have a photography tool in my hands.

You cannot properly assess what may be exposed to your eyes unless you dance: Ansel Adams often made a dance while panting to be in the fractions of moments.

It has been suggested that the brilliant Japanese photographer Eikoh Hosoe danced naked in his mind when his camera captured the even more naked Yukio Mishima in frame.

I could never write or even speak about the “I” in me, about myself.

I am not enigmatic. I am an enigma to myself: I have no idea what I look like scampering from image to image: room to room: reflection to reflection.

I know there is no Nureyev in me.

Citicorp Building New York. Architects: Hugh Stubbins and William Le Messurier

I obviously like to dream in metaphors: the grand gestures: like a tree falling in the forest that nobody hears: But so painstakingly loud.

I might have dreamed that someone saw me as Jack London’s Ghost Wolf: There might have been someone who spotted me as Melville’s Moby Dick at sea. But if I dream wildly, I might be a fraction of the metaphors above. I am still the guy who dances naked atop the whales of the seven seas.

If you understand that I have never seen myself run with cameras in tow: Then there is a sense to how I imagine my passion: Not in my reality but in the dreams of something the planets have yet to fathom:

Certainly everything I mentioned above is made for asylums: A preposterousness that lives in an imagination: It is my own ultimate acknowledgement that it is ok to infuse reality into a dream: It is ok to infuse dreams into reality.

I was in Lewis Carroll country one day. It was the day I saw the second largest poached salmon in history: I was with the artist John Piper: I saw him make a wave towards the Thames. I asked him who/what he was waving to. “I always wave to my imaginary Lewis Carroll rowing with Alice Liddell and her sisters in tow. It reminds me of the surreal happenstance Carroll presided over in his stories: It inspires me to bring my dancing shoes to my canvases”.

I looked over the entire Thames in view. The scene was empty: I waved anyway: I chose to imagine Alice and sisters skittering down river with Carroll at the oar.

#IsayWeinfeld meets #ZahaHadid on New York City

The word “urgency” is the one I pronounce most often when I see a moment that needs to be seized. As an architectural photographer I like to photograph many achievements. I would like to make a successful photograph of the Masai Kraals: I can make sense of an empty Big Sur cabin filled with Monarch Butterflies: I would like to make successful images out of anything Zaha Hadid: I can make sense of anything Frank Gehry.

My mind may play tricks with what I might see. So I stare with a bit more urgency.

There might be a bit of a panic. I know I cannot afford to miss making the moment: The best moment the camera can see. The urgency that fires all of my senses matters.

If your light, your shadow even slightly vanishes then that is when I wonder like Melvilles’ Ahab: Is it too late to harpoon the whale: is my necessary moment missed: How do I explain what I was intended to shoot for client or art: The possibility of the near miss is felt throughout all of Moby Dick: With all of the apparent subplots diverting our attention away from Ahab, it is Ahab at the helm begging for mercy from the gods. We the attentive audience in part don’t want Ahab to succeed. The whale is a bit sacred: But the capture is part heroism and part fanaticism. That is what I embrace when I see the need the urgency to make a capture.

Detail of #RemKoolhaas’Wilshire Boulevard Temple with Shoei Shigematsu

If you do not sense any of the above and then realize the calm when you look through your lens, then why do you do it.

I try oh so very hard to marry my passion for the seizing the perfect exposure with a breathless dance: Country roads and freeways might be minor obstacles to see what perfection looks like.

Can you imagine racing across Tokyo, Shenzhen, New York and Los Angeles: Maybe 2000 square miles is mine to cover: I run, I drive to get where I need to be: My body is burning fuel with anticipation: My mind is in a state of agitated simultaneous combustible explosions.

I am reminded of the Ghost Wolf’s howl: The pained fanaticism that resides in Ahab: It is something that I can hear: It is why I dance: It is why I make photographs. The photographs may become beautiful. Then I begin again.

The Architecture of Cities: The World

November 02, 2023

The Architecture of Cities: The World Mona Lisa

Seagrams Building by Mies Van Der Rohe and Philip Johnsom

Ten million people visit the Mona Lisa each year: A mere glance is held by a handful. Most remember where they were than the brilliance of the lady’s smile.

I too have visited the Louvre: the Mona Lisa: My eyes stayed with her for maybe an eternity: Yet I remember so little aside from a mere few details. I paid my respects with time. I more than appreciated the artists’ efforts. If my memories have feelings, then I do feel da Vinci’s brilliance. But do I remember the painting in its entirety?

I remember my first moment with the architect spectacular: My first Niemeyer: My first Zaha: My first Rem: My first Gehry: The unveiling of the famous architects’ spectacles has become a worldwide event. The stories about the new fabulous achievements seem to appear before our eyes in warp speed. If I understood Quantum Physics I might understand why: Our minds race forward: Maybe a new millennium is upon us: We rarely make time to embrace the entirety of anything, yet alone the achievements in front of us.

Renzo Piano Building: California Academy of Sciences

If you were able to see a drone image of the entire Frank Gehry’ Bilbao what would you remember: If you spent the whole day at Ma Yasong’s new to rise Lucas Museum what might you remember: If you stood in from of Gaudi’s newly completed La Sagrada Familia, what might your mind remember.

I have so many questions to ask the great minds who have passed:

Architects conjure like a witches brew:

I have spent so many years listening to architectures’ generations of voices: I want those voices to explain to me what they do. Maybe it is common, maybe less so. But what I have come home with is that architects design their promise in sections: filling the footprint that was given: They utilize materials to support their ideas, impress their clients and reveal to an urgent audience the brilliance of their ideas. I have traveled to photograph great works of wonder: I want to see what all of the buzz is about. But when I see what I see, what remains? The experience, a few details and more.

The entirety of an experience sometimes eludes us: The mind becomes like a collection of curios and snow globes that we hold dear: Those collections help us recall the details. We need reminding. Our memory banks play tricks on us: We ask about the entire experience: But a few minute details make our story instead.

I write about the subject of memory and entirety because I have spent a career staring into the soul of thousands of some brilliant architectural examples: I have realized that while my camera illustrates an entire home, museum or skyscraper the details still matter most.

I have spent thousands of hours in architects’ studios: Each architect has shared not the mere excitement of designing something bold and beautiful: But the sketches and models that came along years before the project was fully realized.

So when I stand in front of the final reveal, my eyes spasm: It is a fluttering of delight: I dance in place. Not a muscle moves: I begin to consider my relationship to the architects mind: I consider not yet the entire project: I consider the details: I will build a photograph in some way mimicking the architects process of building a project; I will stack the images together: like a Disney Hall or another, I will have tethered an entire spread of detailed images into one.

Kengo Kuma Architect: Aix en Provence Conservatory of Music

I could reveal and magnify my capture as a quintessential celestial experience: Or I could start the building process again: pixel by pixel: detail by detail.

The Architecture of Cities: The World

October 26, 2023

Subway Station in Sao Paulo Brazil by Paulo Mendes da Rocha

After the Rain: The Stolen Moment(s) Live in My Waking Dreams

Let’s travel: London, England, Nantes, France, Stuttgart, Germany, São Paulo, Brazil and more. My window to the world is heralded by guardian angels: The template for my vision lies in the imageries that greater photographers than I executed almost two centuries ago:

Marie Charles Isidore Choiselat and Stanislaw Ratel’s, “The Pavillion de Flore and the Tuileries Garden” circa 1849: Robert Macpherson’s, “The Theater of Marcellus from the Piazza Montanara” circa 1858: Eduardo-Denis Baldus’s, “Cloister of Saint- Tromphîe Arles” Circa 1861: Roger Fenton’s, “Rievaulx Abbey” Circa 1854: Otto Umbler’s, “Night in a small town” Circa 1930.

My mind has a capacious vault for imagery. It also leaves room for a dozen “Blade Runner” images Circa 1982.

My minds’ eyes host an archive of more than one-hundred thousand images. Images of photographs and photographers dance around the maypole in my brain. A sizable archive of architects/architecture has a home near by. My mind rests in a nest of altered visual states.

I have so many favorites and influences: From the visual image to the written word: I import information for inspiration but more importantly for sustenance.

Everyone has influences: a direction they lean towards: but the subject of favorites is for another time.

My appreciation for what I may discover in the space my lens provides is boundless.

Every waking moment I try and configure how to navigate space: How to navigate the light in space: how to navigate the space in light. I may as well be a poor man’s Copernicus

After the Rain

Mercedes Museum: Stuttgart, Germany by Ben Van Berkel UN Studio

When taking a picture after the rain: there is a pause: there is almost a right of passage: and then before the onslaught of activity: I think, “The Queen’s Gambit”.

When I read the Walter Tevis’ novel, I was not theorizing about how or why I was taking pictures.

But a passage in the book about playing chess in your mind or in this case through the windshield with the open roads in the distance, appealed to me. It gave me clarity; Possibly a photographer’ clarity going forward

Sir Norman Foster: City Hall, London England

I have played chess poorly for my entire life. But since reading “The Gambit” I realized that I was making moves in my mind and across the known universe in a similar fashion played out in chess: I was pre-visualizing: I was constructing a photograph the way a chess enthusiast would plan his/her moves. I could see the future: I knew the endgame to the moment. But until that 1983 day I did not understand the parallel universe between the Tevis’ book and how I saw my photographs. I have always known why I had become a photographer: But to place it in an intellectual context: to place it in a context of a game: to place it in the context of how and why I see what I do? Have you ever seen me dance?

Dominique Perrault: Aplix Factory in Nantes France

When the rains came, it allowed me to prepare for when the rains would cease: I needed to be ready for the snap: The unrestrained activity would soon flood the landscape: The viewfinder would be filled with chaos. I wanted the audience to only hear my camera when they looked at the image: The after the rain silence.

The rain ceases in Brazil’s São Paulo: The summer rain had drenched my clothes. I snapped.

The cold rain ceases in Germany’s Stuttgart: The rain dampened my clothes: I snapped.

The never ending rain ceases in England’s London: most bothersome: I snapped

The rain ceases in France’s Nantes: I believed it a miracle as I raced to capture my assignment: I snapped. The rain ceases in America’s Miami: I was soon to capture my assignment: I pranced: I snapped.

Grimshaw Architects: Frost Museum of Science: Miami Florida

I live for the moments I dream about. I love making and building images: Sometimes my friend and foe is the weather: What a game of chess it becomes when you play with nature’s realities. The skies become my game board.

I am no Captain Ahab: I am not obsessive. I have been living with the ways and means to make photographs for decades. It is my (to quote a famous book) “The Waking Dream”.

I know the pleasures that come with the breath within the pause. “There you go”, my mind exclaims: There is the light: There is the space: “Shoot”.

The Architecture of cities: The World

October 19, 2023

The Architecture of cities: The World

The immediacy of now

I remember Belize: It was quite a comfortable discomfort landing. I stood on the tarmac. I waited for know one. I needed to be somewhere I had never been before. I heard the quiet.

The most comparable experience: I land like a David Bowie alien in a foreign environment: Maybe my entire life was before me: I would unknowingly navigate a new space in time.

Like my first safari, I was about to begin the search for my first light: the first time I recognized light as an asset.

Today as then I fear and celebrate the unfamiliar: New territories and unfamiliar light: But somehow I have learned through the years to hunt for what would become the intended light.

My home window looks to the outside world. I could merely make images and write without moving: It seems something Hopperish: I could capture captivating stories like “Rear Window” on steroids: It wouldn’t be Rem Koolhaas’s “Delirious”: It wouldn’t be E.B White’s “Here is New York”: It would be a life in days and nights.

Nothing I do with my camera is fatuous: My mind is always in the hands of photography’s history. I might lazily invoke Cartier-Bresson’s coined:”The Decisive Moment”. But I apply the “…Moment” to Ansel Adams. He raced across country sides to still the light before it vanishes: That is the feverish pitch to the endgame that I pursue. The delight of racing across urban and rural landscapes.

Adams approached landscapes with the same intention Hercule Poirot announced “A Crime is a foot”: Poirot plotted how to solve the crime in similar fashion to Adams plotted how to capture his light to satisfaction.

But then there is the passion to be like Brassai at night: Not to shoot at night: but to have the clarity: Brassai’s pictures have no mystery, but they owned the mysterious. I have always wanted my diurnal rhythms to mimic the agenda in Brassai’s nocturnal rhythms.

All of the above reads so emotionally I feel a bit sick in the head: But when I think about most of the books about architecture and photography I mostly hear pragmatism. If photography of the architecture I see is not from the heart, then something is missing. I pursue the light of architecture, the light in architecture.

I prowl. I face each assignment each day as if I must find the light before it vanishes. Tomorrow might be different: The immediacy is for now.

The world of architecture’s photography is a beautiful place to live: The problem is that there are so many obstacles to be where you need to be: And when. Then you couple those issues with the three stages: The dreams: The voices: The voluminous moments: the many facets needed to accomplish just one successful image is like conquering a rubik’s cube with blinders on: It is the most singular joy I know of in photography.

I always imagined I could make photographs dancing like André Kertész’s “Dancing Faun”.

But for me there is a roar: Have you ever raced across the streets of Dubai: The heat melting your irises, the sun weakens your heart: You cross streets not intended to be crossed: You break the laws to make the picture: It is not merely the heat that makes you act recklessly: It is simply the desire to find the moment before it vanishes.

Have you ever raced across the Tokyo streets: The myriad of a million faces like continuous waves obscuring your intended agenda until you arrive. The light matters before it vanishes

Have you ever raced across Paris: cafes begging you to take a reprieve from your hot pursuit: Temptations are scary. The light matters before it vanishes.

Have you ever raced across London: Miles and miles of histories waiting for my camera: but only one light that day will matter: The one before it vanishes.

Architect’s Wilkinson Eyre. IFS Clous Cable Car near the O2

Across the globe, pictures are revealed to my camera. I inhale before each snap: It is only a matter of fractions of seconds before the vanishing light is captured: Yet when I exhale I feel that a Tolstoy tome has just passed between my cerebral lobes like a digital billboard: Gleeful exhaustion.

Every picture I have ever made reminds me of my arrival in Belize: There is a snake near in the grass: There are two eyes afar in the darkness staring at you: I am alone:

I am prowling for answers and satisfaction before the light of day vanishes into the night. Then there is the quiet.

The Architecture of Cities: The World

October 12, 2023

I remember the first time I heard the Siberian Tiger dance to Led Zeppelin’s rhythmic intro “Going to California”.

I have read that there are less than six-hundred Siberian Tigers in the wild: I have made less than six-hundred successful photographs: There is something wild about mingling mind with nature.

There is something wild about marrying magical realism with the mingling of architecture’s photography.

My camera sees the changing architecture: There are thousands of names to choose from: Some design towers: some design the intimate moments: The moments that might last a millennium or a single legislative decision to augment a city street.

The camera is like a witches brew: The possibility of creating extreme depth of field allows the camera to instantaneously see a cauldron of life’s fast/forward and past/present: The cinematographer Robert Richardson taught me this technique he utilized in the movie “Talk Radio”. He in fact used a single filter. I in fact lost that same filter traveling one day in a dream: But I returned to the mechanics of photography to retrieve a similar capability.

When I visit various corridors of the world, I must enable my eyes to see this strategy:

I am bringing into focus landscape, people and a built environment to inform a larger audience.

I could have spent a lifetime gathering data from the library of congress’s every page.

But I am a student of photography as a discipline and a history: The names that formed my vision allowed curiosity to lead them to the need to photograph a world: Édouard Baldus, Herbert Bayer, Bill Brandt, Saul Leiter and many more examined the world through a unique scope.

If I was to bear witness to the changing world of architects and architecture, I needed to follow their examples on a magical carpet: trains planes and automobiles would have to do.

I have spent a few lifetimes listening to the words of architects: The conveyors of obvious change like Oscar Niemeyer, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Kenzō Tange, Kengo Kuma, Santiago Calatrava and of course countless more who revitalized the vocabulary of architecture.That is why sometimes when I piece these short essays together I remind myself of the “Rock” band “Spirit”. The line from “Nature’s Way”: “It’s nature’s way of telling you a song”, has always raced though my mind when I talk about what I do or what I see. I sing to share.

My mind need not travel too far to consider what and where changes are occurring. But why they are changing and in what form is sort of up to me to explain: Robert Richardson’s considerable affect on my vision and scope, had me re-evaluating almost every perspective I could see.

Then add to the brew the history of photography: my architectural photography. Then like a pastry chef adding swirl of icing to the cake: the many conversations I have had with famous/infamous architects.

I mentioned that I have only produced a few hundred good images out of maybe one hundred thousand photographs.

The reason is that when I travel across cities/countries and continents it is difficult to show the magic in reality. But when I need a bit of inspiration I merely remind myself of my brethren in Siberia: and so we dance.

Kengo Kuma Asakusa Culture Tourist Information Center

The Architecture of Cities: The World

October 05, 2023

The Architecture of Cities: The World

I still stand in wonderment: I feel like Shakespeare’s Puck: Not the merry wanderer of the forest nights: I am the 180º flip side of that.

Though I am six foot-three and a million pounds, I am Shakespeare‘s Puck: I am the merry wanderer: I am Puck’s daylight. I am his light: he is my light: I surrender my love for what freezes before my eyes.

I have stood in the Arcadian idyl of our planets’ paradise. I have stood in the center of our planets’ built metropolises. Wherever I may be my mind only hears the dulcet tones of nature’s pitter patter: My eyes see a reflection of myself in ourselves and in architectures’ reflection on our built environment. I then make a picture.

The things I admit to make me cringe a bit. Does making photographs truly make me that happy?

A friend recently wrote to me:”keep freeze framing those unique moments where built history reflects”. When I see those things that I need to see: When I make a photograph that I need to make, of course the day is mine: The moment is mine: The capture is mine.

One day in a particular year I felt I was concurrently in many countries and many cities. I remember it felt like I was a spider scrambling on all sides of a web that needed mending.

You might imagine the onslaught of emotions running through my mind: In one moment I was making portraits of famous artists: Henry Moore, Joan Miro and Willem de Kooning (stories for another time): in the next my body was running on empty trying to be somewhere before the light vanished.

Is it cathartic to talk/write about the intrusion of my heart entering my mind as I race from here to there to make pictures? No! But hindsight’s 20/20 allows me to reflect on what it has meant for me to race across millions of miles to make a single snap.

As I write I realize that I have come to terms with my personal insanity: I confess that every single picture I have made is a result of my mind celebrating something that I see; something that I literally express in a voluminous scream:”That’s it”.

The above is not a conversation that one would have with a fellow traveler, a fellow photographer.

The nature of what I have done and what I do and will in the future is my own personal drive to make a new photograph: it is like celebrating a feast of pleasures: like the pleasures of wearing attire that is old and agreeable: it is like the pleasures of donning, wearing something brand new.

Though I have traveled quite a bit for portraits there is nothing in my mind that compares to what the life and breath of architecture can be.

The feeling reminds me of cinema’s set designers. They create and recreate moments within frames that were not there or might have been there days, years or centuries before.

When I am in the cities of countries, and countries of continents I am uniting everything I know to make in one single frame: a chemical compound that is all brought together in a single set designers storyboard.

I am always reveling in the moment:

I was standing in Seville, thinking about matadors and bullfights: I was imagining the tragedy of Carmen: I looked deep into my lens: I considered the math, science and technology: The shutter was released: a single photograph was made.

Now let’s be honest: if that is not nuts, nothing is.

The day I saw the lead photograph in this essay, I remember taking a few steps forward. I remember asking myself not to move too quickly. I remember thinking about where I should begin the framing. I remember thinking about where I should crop and of course stop.

My feet moved in so many directions: I just laughed out loud. I was so excited to snippety snap, snap that I was literally dancing in place: My body was completely still: yet my mind and body felt a torrent of passions that was totally out of control: The moment was frozen!

From somewhere came the drumming in Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing”. I danced a bit: