Architecture of Cities: How We See Secrets

July 25, 2024

When I was about nine years old, I sat in the rear-deck of a “Tiger Sunbeam” Grand Prix pace car: The race began and I was the one watching the racing cars gear up to catch me: “Vroom” raced the two and three cylinder cars: I couldn’t believe how fast I was moving: Actually in hindsight I felt as if I was in some adult alternative universe: The sensation of standing still: The earth rotates behind me: The earth rotates in front of me: The figure eight race track became a blur: My future seemed to be patterned unrealistically: I became a human being at nine:

The little boy’s life is mine today: I race around cities: I never feel as if I am moving: Physics is explaining how I see: My captures are from the heart:

There is a setting on the modern digital cameras where you half press and decide later: It can be called “dragging the shutter”: In essence, the photographer may decide later: For me, one million images I have dragged from my genesis until what might be requiem:

My entire world fades: My past captures lay like animated blurs: An infinite amount of celluloid and digital images circle my head like Road Runners skirting ahead of Wile E. Coyotes.

A well known editor( now deceased) and a famous architectural critic approached me on different days with similar ideas: Secret cities: Los Angeles and New York secrets:

It was as if I became the Jaguar espying the Orinoco crocodile: Something so desirable: Something to desirously sink my teeth into: Something to conquer: My passion for a dream seemed within an eyelash: My spirits were rekindled: I had this thrilling dream to tell: Visual stories would highlight my passions: To share secrets: Not mine alone: For a few seconds I could be that Jaguar: The camera would capture what others have seen: The startling possibilities of these revelations compelled me to whisper: “Shhhh”! I will be capturing not just cities but the secrets that become: The books died soon after the propositions: Like all furious fires, the ambers remain: New secrets materialized: The secrets my camera capture would be realized not just today but tomorrow as well:

If for one fraction of time you stood where I had once seen: If for one fraction of a second if you stood along my eyes as I captured the works of 40 Pritzkers: Thousands of ideas that became: If only you would lend me your eyes: I will share not only for what I capture, but from where I may have stood.

A blind person has grand ideas as if Fantasia lives inside of his/her dreams and memories: Fantasia is a visual concept that carries my eyes daily: What the world of Saarinen’s, Wright’s, Niemeyer’s, Gehry’s, Piano’s and Hadid’s might be: This is not a placebo from the two cities’ books that faded: This world with the hundreds of architects and thousands of built architecture has become a treasure trove of dreams, memories and secrets: I share what I see from where I stood:

I have seen The Secret Garden: It is not mine: It has been in the mind or reason of millions: It has become my Fantasia, my camera’s secret: My captures: My shares:

The Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes from São Paulo walked me through his city: His hands flew aggressively like a protest marcher begging for me to see his truths: His eyes were my guides to his secrets: To this Pritzker recipients real life Fantasia: It was a share that I felt was a secret for me: The way I captured his secrets became embedded in my mind: The memory of my lenses.

Secrets come in many forms: Take a few seconds to do the math.

The Architecture of Cities: Magic in the Cities

July 18, 2024

Hemingway’s descriptions are maps of lives and entreaties: Please see what my words convey he begs:

My camera was born many years following: My eyes became aware of his eyes before I became…:

Now I dream to make visual captures in and about his words:

The human condition maintains a superabundant collection of pleasures: I spar daily with each and every one: I am not fighting them off: I am enjoying the full spectrum of what I am privileged to see: The sparring is like dancing in the ring with Muhammad Ali: Each day I anticipate a moment to be down: Each day I rise to see more than the day before: I am dreaming with my eyes wide open.

Moments past seem so warped in a mind wrapped in digital celluloid: The simple life of a poem spreads its words across my visual memories: My entire life of captures had been immortalized centuries before:

A.E.Housman

“Blue Remembered Hills”

“Into my heart an air that kills

From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again.”

Every day I share the cities I have visited: I don’t share my map: Rest assured I am not a wandering Odysseus, conquering Alexander or Genghis: I share to bare witness to the worlds I have seen and not yet seen: Those worlds are the places where magic lives: From my front porch to real time constellations: The nature of this photographer is not to explore the built environment of nations: It is to explore what magic may be captured in those nations:

My image of me stands alone in a Shenzhen reflection: My image of me is reflected alongside the East Rivers’ United Nations: My image about me is witnessed by thousands inside Grand Central Station: My image of me stands alongside a Zaha Hadid design: Her ghost in this glimpse is mine:

The magic in my captures rests somewhere between piano’s ebony sharps and flats: There is a silence between every key as there is between every multitude of shutter clicks:

Mozart played a key: Yo Yo Ma played a chord: A billion musicians have played a chord followed by the languid lingering anticipation of a next note: It is what I feel every day: Every day there is a quiet snap that is not a photograph until…:the magic of captures is the silence between chords and keys: The gasping exhale between Houdini’s death and breath: The silence of magic appears only when there is something that wasn’t there becomes: Magic in moments of capture remind me of chasing shadows that have never been: Magic in its entirety is a lovelorn adherence to the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour: The dreams of living in magical times is a mere moment: My dreams may be my reality:

The nature of my light is often unseen: Gamma rays come to mind: So small: So potent: I stand alone: Chaos abounds in surround sound: The camera is calm: An entire second passes: “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds” comes to mind: My reflection, is captured: Chaos and dreams live between musician’s keys; between magician’s miracles: silent magic captures my moment:

The Architecture of Cities: Migrating Monarchs

July 11, 2024

Marching into Cities:

The history my eyes remember:

How could I possibly imagine the incalculable migrating Monarchs flirting with the heavens infinite cosmos: Their wings flutter like voices possibly passionately heard: Those sounds may influence a millennium of captures:

I am a photographer surrounded by the beckoning of many voices: The voices have influenced my photography: My photography is influenced by the voices that echo through my cities: My eyes temper the unmelodic melodies of all cities: My eyes capture the most pristine and unwieldy of dangers that are the nature of cities

I am here to remember:

I remember I was supposed to ride horse back through the Sierra Nevada:

I remember I was supposed to stretch my legs along the Swiss alps foothills:

I remember I was supposed to walk among Russians in forests dotted with dachas:

I remember I had been asked to raft across the jungles of the Amazon:

So many dreams live in nature’s adventures still outstanding: My life at times is thrillingly alive in those bygone dreams.

Sometimes I run around like an injured or fledgling rehabbed bird trying to rediscover formative balance: I try my wings: I begin to fly: I fly to focus on the definition of beauty in a complicated dream: The capture is front and center: My eyes aflame I posture: Am I ready.

Heroes of sorts, come to my rescue: The voices of others celebrate alongside my aims: They appeal to most moments: I am standing alone with Miles Davis’s “My Funny Valentine?: Maybe: I am remembering Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia collective of built brilliance: Maybe: I am Man Ray’s blind ambition: His photography; the embodiment of visual wilderness: My mind is rekindled::Maybe: My mind imagines like Giacometti: I see thin giants of magical proportions: Maybe: Do I dream as Akira Kurosawa’s “Dreams”: Are my eyes invited into his heart: Maybe his eyes are invited into my heart: Maybe:

How many thousands of heroes invite me into their world to make a single capture: Is this when the fledgling photographer finds strength to fly: How do I look: How does the capture become: What does Lewis Carrol’s Alice think.

Thousands and millions forged ahead thinking their ideas are theirs alone: Influences are circling in nano seconds above: listen:

My mind languishes above and through the city: I am only in Berlin, London, Paris, Rio, Barcelona, Moscow… for a single built capture: I march alone with an army: Why not open my arms and capture all of Rome, Hong Kong, New York and thousands more:

I navigate through not merely to make it all mine: I have a simple request for my camera: Make a memory of where I have been: I want to feel as if I am not merely capturing but communing with photography’s architecture, the architecture in photography:

The lingering madness that appeals most present in my mind’s eyes may be the heart of Calvino’s Invisible Cities: The truth from what you remember is revisited in various stages of blurred and sharpened focal points: The memory of your memories is home to various degrees of accuracy:

Architecture illuminates cities: Cities illuminate architecture: What I see and may not see is crucial: How I see where I have been is the definition of my captures.

I am alive to make something beautiful: I need to elevate the beauty of the mood: I grab hold of something finite: I examine the facets a bit closer: I find a way to break through atoms: I stare into the eye of a hurricane: I am inundated by something extraordinary: I breathe: I make a capture: I am allowed to dream.

The Architecture of Cities: The Irony of Bears

July 04, 2024

Based on a True Story:

Sometimes you don’t know where you are until you stand alone, there:

The Baltic Sea I stood with: I thought about all of the nations that rest ashore: I dreamed about the serenity and volatile currents that travel from shore to shore: I remembered where I had landed before and yesterday:

The Baltic is home for some: I remember when for a mere five minutes I could translate the languages of many tongues, and then none: My captures have danced lightly over Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Russia, Germany and of course Latvia.

I heard a sound as I stood facing the past and with luck a bit of my futures: “Bear” was heard: I kept to myself for a bit: I was a guest among others: There was a stir: There was some running towards the transport: I looked and saw a black shape: In my funny hindsight it reminded me of Frank Gehry: Maybe because so many refer to Frank as a “teddy bear”: I realized a black bear was on the move: I was chased for a mere few seconds along the Latvian coast: He ran: I ran: Here I am.

That is how it can be when you travel alone: I have landed where the bears are profoundly home to a few billion Chinese, one hundred and fifty million Russians, and possibly fifty million Californians: Symbolism reigns: I want my photographs to remind me of the places and the experiences: a bear chasing me across a beach towards the forest: or maybe the mere fact that I am landing and have landed where the architecture lures my cameras.

I travel from country to country city to city rural outback to places further than my imagination will allow: My experiences appear to have become like dots connected along a languid serpentine line: Espied from above: drawn on earth alone:

The architecture that I see enlightens me: lights the way: It is magical to unload my mind on a unique capture: No matter the noise that surrounds me there is simply a peace that I use to make a space seem right:

I have always dreamed: My mind has always needed to be rescued: The intimacy of voices: those who have invited me into their home: There are some who wanted me to hear their voices: to embolden my captures: To rescue me from my dreams.

Wherever I have been my eyes are often interrupted by what the picture should look like: Then as if in a Greek tragedy: The chorus saves me: The chorus has mostly been about the voices who have invited me to listen in their home: Oscar Niemeyer, Philip Johnson, Paulo Mendes and Richard Rogers come to mind. The giants didn’t merely allow me to take some portraits: Their voices invited me into their world if only for a few hours: a few moments:

I share the above because whether it be those particular Pritzker Prize recipients or others: When I am alone in front of any assignment or happenstance I evolve into a into a character with many heads and several sets of eyes: I refer to the many intimate voices for a bit more clarity:

The Baltic: Alone by the sea is where I have sat many times not merely waiting for inspirations but mostly an appreciation for the privilege: It is an absolute privilege to interpret the built environment across countries and beyond. The dreams are relentlessly intertwined into my realities: oh what a pleasurable nightmare of trysts this journey has been.

Architecture of cities : Birds of Prey

June 27, 2024

A glance at Raphael Vinoly’s 432 Park Avenue New York, New York

Based on a true story

I once chased after a red tail hawk: I ran down a mountain: the sloping valley appeared near:

I was a photographer about to make a capture: nearly out of breath, I abruptly stopped: I reached two more steps:

I looked down: the abyss reigned.

I roamed inclusive in the sky’s currents: I sailed at maybe five to seven-thousand feet: The altitude allowed me to see my New York: The parachute lofted: The twilight paused: A flourishing of dew blanketed a feathered black bird accompaniment: The exact breed escaped my mind: My irises were layered with unsullied passions. I am drawn to nature

The flights I have imagined are about a bundle of dreams: They are akin to the many perches I have utilized to see how I need to see:

How the camera alighted for adventures and captures is what I fondly remember:

I have landed in cities that I sadly must have forgotten: Years of decades, decades of years have filled my life with moments that I am still dreaming about:

Overtime I have been invited to cities: I have been engaged to make visual diaries: Diaries that somewhere live with words: Diaries are captures of imagery that needed to be recorded: Recorded to merely discourse about: Recorded for a memory ala “Proust’s” or others: A history of diarists have filled my life with passions: Passions don’t always make the best photographs: Passions drive me.

I have landed among the fifty: Fifty cities and fifty examples of alluring, angular architectural treatments: The fifties are a mere fraction of what my eyes have captured per day per city: One, ten or fifty buildings: My eyes trace the land, mine the future captures: My eyes keep pace as I crisscross the city’s grids. I am always finding my point of engagements: More importantly I am absorbing the shapes and sounds of an entire life in a city;

The wide range of voices who expressed interest in how I would or might see their cities are treasures: How else can I appreciate my “fifties” in London, Dubai, Barcelona, Berlin, Tokyo, Miami, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and a blinding number more: The experiences and the people amount to what Mark Twain wrote in Letters from the Earth: “…a fountain-spray of fire, a million stupendous suns…”. If I cannot be enthralled with such passion and fire, what is the point of capturing a life in images.

What if for a day, I was cast in Casper David Friedrich’s “Wanderer above the Sea of FogThe Wanderer…”: more importantly, what if I was his listener: what if I was frozen in his time: What if for a mere collective of ideas I was his disciple: What if I was tutored by other’s eyes: what if the moment was about living and listening.

I must stand with someone: Why not with a romantic like myself who sees the world captured as a series of lessons: To see: How do you measure the value of one visual hero versus another:

I am alone in, of course my own personal wilderness: I am never really alone: I lean on other’s for inspiration: I lean on other’s for perspective: I assume the eyes of other’s for a mere single capture.

Which Casper David Friedrich’s titles become mine: Is it’s “The Wanderer…” or might it be “Chalk Cliffs of Rügen”. I am alone, and those things matter: I clutch whatever I may grasp from other’s: It is only to empty their imagery woven into mine until I find my own voice.

Then the hat is tossed: a confetti of ideas grasping at the wind like one hundred toy pinwheels display their purpose: I am nobody if I am not myself.

But what if I was a bit like Casper David Friedrich: The romantic wanderer: I would bear witness to transference of time in dreams: From Casper to now I would be setting the stage for the ghosts I have chased before me:

If I was a romantic I might never know it:

I think I have always been a romantic.

Red Tail Hawk nor a black bird afloat in my skies: so many breeds of prey attend to my life and perspectives: Where is there a wrong turn or idea.

Welcome to my dreams: the day that never ends.

Architecture of Cities: Hatteresque Days

June 20, 2024

The floral, florid, flush of the colossal squid was lost from its native habitat: The giant scurried within the Pacific Equatorial undercurrent: Her giant arms pulsed like flags thrusting through an entire Pacific Ocean: Atop the the capping waves the HMS Beagle with Darwin and Darwinian disciples paced the stripped bare naked boat towards a reckoning with history:

The NASA Space Voyager 1 torched the sky: The galaxies not yet seen awaited: Variances of warp speeds tickled and touched the imaginations of millions: Disciples of any and every star, awaited:

My idea of man and the universe’s evolution were on a collision course: The Beagle and the Voyager were both naked: They hosted our imaginations: We just might hear thrusts of oceanic energies and jet propulsions: We would anxiously anticipate the return of the unknowns not yet known.

I remember utilizing my Ouija to commune with the British photographer Roger Fenton: His 1854 portrait of the Yorkshire Rievaulx Abbey has been a visual template for so many of my own architectural captures: To wander among the ghosts who make the light: To wander through the history: To wander naked and feel all of the eyes who lived before you: A twelfth century ruin is a skeletal remnant: My wearied eyes have long been tantalized by what remains: Memories of what became are also memories of what vanished: Time reminds me that I must dance: The ghosts hold the the truths I must capture.

While making photographs of inanimate objects the soul engages one thousand lifetimes: One structure hosts a nations’ history, region, politics, evolution in a single footprint:The music, dance, and ghosts that will be mine:

Imagine the first twelve seconds of West Side Story’s “Cha Cha”Leonard Bernstein https://open.spotify.com/album/2S8lu73iVBYeVh1oPQo9jI?si=f2l62JMZQxehcnu3q9WvyA: I quietly enter the path to make a portrait of a thousand buildings: Just a mere few notes allow me to listen to see what I need to see. I advance for a more engaged capture: I would like to think that maybe Coldplay’s “Clocks” 4:16YouTube • ColdplayColdplay - Clocks (Official Video) steps in: I further my quest; I would like to think that Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven fills the lighted voids: I find that I am quietly finessing my final moments, my final captures:I would like to think that Miles Davis’s “Will O’ the Wisp” 3:50YouTube • jazzhole13Miles Davis - Will O' the Wisp allows me to complete my journey: My real and imaginary capture in a single frame.

Daniel Libeskind: Manchester England: Imperial War Museum

My eyes see the history of cities: I am a member of the triple “A” club: Anthropology, Archaeology and Adventure: I explore, excavates and evaluate why I stand naked to the world every day: My mind is stripped bare: I begin gathering worlds in each frame: I am like a family of Wandering Albatross Parents: They may incubate their eggs for a few months: I incubate every capture every dream and every frame for months before I know when it can be released to others:

To capture a moment is an adventurers’ dream: To discover is the archaeologists’ dream: To connect cultural histories is an anthropologist’ dream:

The idea of visiting worlds not yet seen and revisiting worlds that you have never left is a nightmare of pleasures:

Madness stems from the day I die before I am supposed to die: is there madness attached to reason? Is there madness attached to the goals not met? My camera could live no other way:

Let the Mad Hatter Eat a Peach.

Architecture of Cities: The Sounds of Light

June 13, 2024

#PhilipJohnson #CapitalGrille #42nd Street #NewYorkCity

Photography is a grand illusion. Grand illusions bind our truths to our memories: Photography shares the past and future ghosts. Grand illusions are memories that we covet: Memories are held so our eyes may revisit our pasts: We love the ghosts of memories past: we love the memories that will soon appear before our eyes: Memories that you once thought would remain forever vanish.

Photography retains our history.

My mind nightly arises to nightmares: My mind awakens to daydreams not known:

I am everyone I want to be and anyone I can be: The dreams I have never experienced are not unique to me nor anyone: The lives that have never been are why I am a photographer.

There are moments that are meaningless in another life: Moments are meant to celebrate: There may never be a moment again:

I often stand in Tolkien’s middle earth: It is a quiet place before I realize the imaginary Arda is home to imaginations not yet seen. My photographs are not any different than what others may make: My captures allow me to celebrate where I stand: Tolkiens’ center earth envelops a large portion of my world’s history: The agenda in full is to experience his world, and the study of one million astrophysicists and mine in single frame: I try to marry every science in existence to one stolen capture: My purpose is inane insane and absolutely why I live: A few seconds ahead of this moment a new capture will be revealed: just wait and see.

I stood in the center of Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa: I wondered not merely about the diagonals and the dimensions of a continent: What stood today before yesterday.

I am not sure why Ethiopia is now the analogy for why I take pictures: Nothing seems as real as Ethiopia: Maybe I am sharing my camera not only about what it captures: Maybe it is the ultimate archaeologists tool.The camera refines every exploration: It is as if each frame is siphoning a quasi history in f-stops.

#ThomMayne SanFrancisco Federal Building

Maybe it has something to do with Mussolini: Can you hear the planes, tanks and explosions echoing across the 1930s African continent during the invasion: Yes? No? Then you become me:

The history in that moment that I have no captures lives in my mind in every single frame: I allow the designs of world wars and more infuse some sensibilities: I realize every single photograph is a novices’ class in archaeology: I examine every breath before I capture: I stand before every frame not yet made and begin: the dream:

Every city I visit,every city I anticipate, every city I dream about is my Addis Ababa: What happened before me and what will happen tomorrow and a century following: That my friends is why Mussolini rapes my ears: I listen: I listen: I listen for things not seen, and what remains: I still is not about war: It is about Middle-Earth and Arda: It is about Astrophysics and Archaeolgy: It is about almost three-hundred years of photography: I ramble and race: I wonder how long until I no longer hear and see:

I have told so many stories about things that I no longer remember: my passions alight in a moment

My camera is alerted: I thrive: It is as if one thousand luthiers call upon me to hear the perfections and imperfections in their craft: Yo Yo Ma and all of the instrumental accompaniments play not for me but for me to listen:

The sound plays before I see the light: I stood patiently for a light to whisper “shoot”: I was in San Francisco photographing the San Francisco Federal Building: I heard a sound down the side street: My eyes averted the noise and I gazed up:

I followed a thousand cackling tourists as they followed pass a corner of a splendid Disney Hall accent: Silence prevailed: I spotted three shadows on a curved passageway:

I stood across the street from the Chrysler Building: Sirens alarmed me to danger: My eyes averted the sound and the emergency lights: in the southern exposure something changed: The lights became:

I Spent a few days in Spain: If my memory is right: I made one thousand images of the country’s history in one hour: Is that true or envious? No: But the sounds of one city and more shared pleasurable torture in every single frame: the sounds averted my eyes to discoveries yet seen: One million times I repeated the mantra: shoot: The captures enlightened my dreams:

#EmpireStateBuilding dances with #MarbleCollegiateChurch
If it was was not for the drilling I might never have looked up

I, till this day believe the sounds of moments were like a conductor’s baton leading in places and directions that I might never know: Then there was the light.

I was never in Ethiopia.

The Architecture of Cities: Just a Dream

June 06, 2024

Imagine Fifteen thousand blinks per day: 15000 moments in which I have missed a photograph: 15000 snaps I think about: Each day, every day I ask: so now what? So now what must I do. How do I recapture time and imagery that has been lost in my mind or absconded by thieves in the night, thieves in the day: Fifteen thousand amounts to almost four hundred million images I have not made in my life: Where have they all gone.

Imagine one thousand planetariums: Each punctured with with one million little star like holes: Now imagine tossing planetarium atop one hundred bilboquets: Your eyes freeze frame: your mind steadies: your dreams electrified: Imagine my naked retinas gathering stories: I cannot miss a single moment with all of those stars pointing me in one and every direction: I do not crave to capture: I crave to consider what I will capture: Time and ideas unfold: The aperture opens and shuts like light blinding darkness into light. This is the simple life of a couple of eyes examining what lives before you. Now imagine the joys of dreams.

The Glimmer that caught my eyes: Madison Square Park” #KPF Architects and #Related Developers

My little big secret: I love the life of a visual storyteller who chicken pecks with an abundance of ideas:Most ideas that will never see the light of day: The ideas live in my every visual moment: Those moments becomes a photograph: I must pause: Time hurries along my side: hurry I must.

There is the cinema’s spools of film making a clippety-clap-clap: There is a constant whirr with silence:

Black and white sprockets splayed like abstractions on the screen: They disappear before I can count one: The movie might have just completed: The movie is about to begin: All of my influences are imaginary: memories in real time either vanish or are stolen: fragments of visual tenses are immersed in cinema’s history. My secret is that my visual life is a constant reminder of what I wanted to be: A reminder of the shapes of things I have always wanted to be and see.

Architect #Odile Decq #Paris 8th Arrondissement

In no particular order I remember I am a disciple of many: I wanted my pictures to howl like Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo atop the bow along the Amazon: I wanted be the disciple of Orson Welles cinematographer Gregg Toland: I wanted like Toland to invent techniques that were not seen but were seen with awe across hours of screen time: I wanted to be a disciple of Charlie Chaplins cinematographer Rollie Totheroh: I wanted Rollie to share the best perspectives for filming people while exposing the audiences to moments of laughter and passion: I wanted to be so many people: I wanted to insert my eyes into their film cameras: I wanted to be part of one hundred or one million masterpieces: I wanted to understand the consequences and pleasures of being brilliant and the consequences of being brilliant and failing. I just wanted to be part of moments that made me feel.

No matter the moment: No matter the architecture: No matter the design: There is no process: There is possibly a discovery of the seen and unseen. My eyes live in a constant investigation of a city’s, a planets’ behavior: My camera enjoys the discovery my eyes see and what my eyes may see. The ideas in my eyes change as my mind changes: My mind changes with every glimpse of something I have never seen before.

A Fragile or even a sacred moments lost is never heartbreaking: My eyes’ memory blinks 15,000 per day: quantify that in terms of not merely a day but a lifetime capturing what was, is, and will be.

The Architecture of Cities: Realities

May 30, 2024

I have considered that I have spent decades as an illogical architectural photographer:

I have considered that I have spent decades as a voyager who has embarked on many journeys to find photographs that will become architectural:

I have considered that I have spent sensible and irrational decades wondering what it might mean to be an architectural photographer.

I have thought about my conversations with Oscar Niermeyer, Ricardo Legorreta, Kevin Roche, Zaha Hadid, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Kengo Kuma, Paolo Soleri, Richard Saul Wurman, Arata Isozaki, Santiago Calatrava and hundreds more. They may or may not be (according to folk-lore) what the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley referred to as the “best and brightest…”.But I do know their shares; a tête-à-tête eased my anxious: eased my needs to tear up the earth: they unwittingly propelled my mind’s eyes to see the practice of my photography, illogically.

Architect: Fuksas Shenzhen, China airport

The Kipling “IF” rattles my mind: If I were to partially morph into Kipling I would say: If I were to abide by his principles: If I could hear his gentle mentoring: if I might receive the gift of sensible sensibilities: I begin again.

My cameras’ ideas live: My brain has an abundance of compartmental viewing screens: I make photographs as if I am outlining visual algorithms: I make photographs that inadvertently abort the patterns infused by algorithms: I begin again.

The language of others often pop into my intimate reverberating cranial conversations: Sometimes it feels like prairie dogs on adderall: Sometimes it feels like Smokey Robinson’s wine infused full-throated falsetto cooing “ooh baby baby”. How does one compare hisself to himself when the visions for exploration live in a false dream? I remain an illogical photographer.

Science fiction is a fiction about reality: I am photographing what might be the real world to some: What may or may not be real is open to debate: I photograph for one entity or another: I reveal to a planet that what is seen in my camera might never have come to the light of day. A million other cameras travel the planet to recover and recall our built communities: Architecture’s architects sometimes fail to realize why the visual image is significant to our past, present and future: Again.

Architect: Jürgen Mayer: Building Mannheim, Germany

My visual thoughts often recall my voice/visual assistant Major Tom: David Bowie’s Space Oddity: “Ground control to Major Tom”, lives in degrees of my reveries: The call is something superficial: something so vital to the way ideas become realities.

Those who know me a wee bit understand that my mind often travels atop and along the ridges of the “bardo”(to borrow from Tibetan tradition and of course George Saunders). I follow a kaleidoscope’s path as I step into the heroic visions of past generations and the mastery of what might become.

Yes I can hear my assistant Major Tom: I know the balance of what may be best is part of the visual quest: The rules of visual algorithms need to be adhered to: The physical and visual context are everything until just possibly a hosts of visual revisionism’s come into play.

Tales are tales: but the truths that lie front and center are deliciously true: Those truths become my photographs as reality becomes science fiction and science fiction becomes reality.

Now tell me what you see.

Architect: SANAA. New Museum, New York City

The Architecture of Cities: Shapeshifters

May 23, 2024

Santiago Calatrava Architect: St.Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church and National Shrine:
I photographed the church before “September 11th” and Made this image recently

The oasis that was once Africa:

Travel is neither romantic nor adventurous: It is biblical: It is about a past not yet seen. It is about a place known as our planet: I have grappled with the significance and pleasures of my photography from series and series series of historical compositions and recitations. My mind is filled with dog-eared reminders of where I need to be while history’s moments are still jewels: I am not writing a memoir: My eyes are about my memoirs as moments.

Elsewhere:“If you understood everything I said, you would be me”[Miles Davis].

What happened before history became history: Before there was a Congo there was a quieter landscape: The recitations of In Paradisium might not have been heard. But what if you dream in loud volumes a bit; What if with a bit of romantic clarity you realize that In Paradisium was possibly the antecedent to “The Saints Come Marching In”: What if you march alone in the footsteps of history’s Kingdom of the Kongo: What if you are the only one who can hear “The Saints…”.A past that can transport your dreams and mind across the globe but maybe within a few feet of your front door to discover what you are looking for: not elsewhere but here: I am drawn to the minds’ map of past, present and future reveries.

Jeanne Gang’s Aqua seen in reflection: Chicago

Anticipation is equal parts a celebration of what your eyes dreamed about: A disappointment that your eyes expectations were not met: I have had so many episodic dreams; and they all suffer the fate of what I was hoping for and the everlasting “is this it”.

We admire discovery for many reasons: Our hearts and minds dream of what it might be like to be first: I have always thought about when people like David Livingstone or Sir Richard Burton arrived at where they wanted to be: It is not their memoirs nor biographies that tell me my truth: it is their eyes revealing every step that led to when they arrived: There can be no measure of how the mind receives the eyes impressions.

When you are alone in mind and place, there is no such thing as an intellectual or emotional lighthouse warning: I wish there was.

When I am using any type of transportation it invariably means that I am energized by the almost stillness of a sundial: everything in the vicinity of my mind feels like a maelstrom of images and ideas: Nothing is moving as fast as it should: everything is racing by me too fast to appreciate: I am anticipating the unknown experience: I am frightened by the movement of the light of the day: I am frightened by what may become my moment: I am frightened by what failure may feel like: I slap my internal sundial to make certain it is not yet a corpse nor am I.

I have celebrated the idea of elsewhere and the anticipated psychosis that saddles up to my eyes as arrive at what may be.

Imagine being embroiled in The Battle of Dorking everyday you mount an offensive to find peace to snap a capture: Fiction, fiction and more fiction lies in my mind as I approach a heralded piece of architecture: So many dreams are ensconced in my mind: So many recordings play round and round in my memories: The minds of generations: Do I remember what what great minds from the architectural design discipline shared with me? Zaha Hadid told me? Do I remember what Jacques Herzog, Kenneth Frampton, Frank Gehry, Oscar Niemeyer, Kengo Kuma and so many shared. Why is it important? Motivation is the accelerant that appeases my angst, and gets me through the anticipation to capture: allows me to capture what I may anticipate.

Renzo Piano’s ‘The Shard” in reflection (ergo the lights in the sky” while waiting for my moment

Why The Battle of Dorking matters? Because a story about all of our future truths is our “lighthouse warning”: something is out there: It isn’t fortune-telling: Shapeshifters live around us and possibly through us: they disappear into the landscapes and our minds: the camera has to be prepared for how our world is altered before our eyes by all of the natural elements: the world is filled with shapeshifters of every kind: I am prepared to experience the joy of engaging greatness, and the measures of disappointment.

I race to capture the moments: what remains is just that, a moment.

When I am alone in the Kingdom of the Kongo’s valleys and deserts, there is that memoirist’ moment.

The Architecture of Cities: Between Two Winds:

May 16, 2024

There is a fairy tale that I often share:

In some ways I have likened my life capturing images to a life and death battle with an octopus: You know that moment when the sea is filled with darkness and the octopus grabs an ankle as you are trying to lift your head above level to make that snap:

How important can that moment: what extension of your mind does it take to make a visual capture: There is both a task and a battle ahead.

In my world I have to deal with at least two winds: My mind is coordinated to imagine: The surroundings that are most natural engage each and every antenna: I need to focus on the natural forces of the known environment to execute a moment: What might the known environment look like:

REX Architect: : Perelman Performing Arts Center Meets One World Trade Center

The southern winds deal in fathoms: How deep is necessary to see what I need to see: What depths do I need to explore before I can see beyond what the photograph is and what it can be: I feel the lure of the Venus flytrap’s silky lip atop the Mariana Trench: slightly encumbered by the fast and taunting Dumbo Octopus, Frilled Shark, Dragonfish, Fangtoothe fish, Barreleye fish, Vampire Squid: I reach deeper towards the deep: Certainly there is not s definition of the deep until I have made a capture:

The northern winds deals with the unfathomable: From above celestial alien armies consider unimaginable attacks on the known planet earth: How high must I reach to discover something not new but more importantly not yet seen. I reach upwards to see and feel the necessities of finding an image: Two converging worlds as if shaken but not stirred together inside an ornamental glass snowball: polemic universes imminently collide: Each day I embrace the needs to make as many snippety-snap-snaps as possible before I can no longer avoid the brains’ inevitable chemical combustion.

The meanings of sanity and madness live in every freeze frame. I have had dreams that become reality: Realities have many times seemed like dreams: Discovery isn’t always what you might have hoped for: I have since before birth imagined that I would create a new cool as Miles Davis had.

I did and maybe always do dream of what “The Birth of the Cool” would mean in my captures:

I thought at one time and I am sure tomorrow I will feel again, that landing in Rio, Dhaka, Belize City, Copenhagen and New York was cool.

I did think and possibly in the future I will continue to think that making photographs like my heroes W.Eugene Smith, Bill Brandt and Man Ray was and would be cool:

One hundred years later I realized that what is new could be cool and what is cool could be new: in the end I am me.

Time intervenes sometimes as a friend and foe: I never know when the a moment interrupted will make or break the momentum I have collected to make a capture: But time created an illogical connection for me: Thematically my images have become some sort of study: I am a victim and a survivor of the discipline and life study portrayed in my own “Gorillas in the Mist”: To understand my ideas, I needed to understand my cameras’ idiosyncrasies. What mattered, I realized, was that cultivating a way to see and a way to make an image became the only visual gift that I will die with: how does one die without living:

There is an emotional and visual transparency that tags along with me from day to day, image to image: It is as if there rides with me a polyphonic symphony of visual sounds: a collective of ideas from science fiction movies overlap the history of science fiction literature as I wander: I wander in film freezes: I wander around moments that will be stories: I hope it never stops:

New York City: Tiffany’s Interior by Peter Marino and Shohei Shigematsu

I am constantly addressing the new in architecture: New is not necessarily what has been built today: new is a force of discovery when you engage something aged or as the “star child” from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Something mesmerizes your camera as it appears seemingly for the first time: Possibly it is only new in this light.

I emphatically share the “two winds”. A photographer alone in the fields or the avenues is constantly pressed for time and ideas: Even when there are none: there is a crush of information and desires that compel the eyes to look for more than poses before your eyes: Then we’ll see.

The Architecture of Cities: A Bit of Fantasy

May 09, 2024

There are the …ings ( buzzing, stunning, and living) that some may imagine. Then there are the …y’s (Dreamy, beauty and fantasy) that might come to mind.

There were two naked bumble bees inside of a lab Petri dish. Their furs had fallen along their backsides as they seemed to expose their nakedness: This was the bee hazard: a form of dancing that appeared to be about twirling around a maypole: This was a moment of natural erotica not yet seen by this human eye.

I have made portraits of a number of scientists: Some “Nobel’s” and other extraordinary characters: But the one who remains a fixture in my mind is Geerat J. Vermeij, a Paleoecologist and Evolutionary Biologist: When I sat my camera down to listen to his dreams that were realities I began to understand what seeing means in life and photography: Seeing is a way of participating in the minutiae and the universes’ collective of galaxies:

Geerat is blind: His brain had a pyrotechnic event as a young boy: he lost his sight but transferred the senses to his brain and beyond: He can land in almost any part of the world and grab a seashell among the oceans wake and identify the seashell and the geography he postures in.

Photographing someone who is blind is a fairly facile assignment: Then you must try and understand: There is no truth to “an easy” photograph: Blind or not, who are they, and what are they trying to say is a human condition still too complicated to master with my camera.

The funny sad reality of my photography is that my mind lives among an abundance of hives: I am listening and looking for direction: Directions that are manipulated by the way sounds drive the camera to pay attention: Directions on where to look:

No structure living within the tiniest or most gigantic footprint is literally sitting there by itself: Waiting for its closeup, waiting to be discovered. To make something awaken within your camera frame: there is extensive existential investigation: an examination of the existing properties: One must discover what should remain in the frame.

It is possible to imagine walking in the shadows of Beatrice Potter: She was and possibly remains the caped queen of fairy tales. She enthusiastically nailed the grooves of the mushrooms/fungi natural habitat: Hustling with intellectual clarity she made drawings that fascinated and lived like a metaphor for a life not experienced: The world is colored: My world is filled with color: there is a bit of fantasia in my everyday if I allow for it.

My camera mounts an assault on a image to be made: Like the Potter tales collectively living among the masses of nature’s realities: architecture lives amongst us with tales of equal history and mystery.

Kengo Kuma’s Tokyo: A view from a Kengo Kuma Building

I think about those tales and where they for me originated: possibly retreating back to my very first time on rue de bac in Paris: I stood nestled between the curvature of the street and the ( DEYROLLE, a Parisian cabinet of curiositiesDeyrollehttps://deyrolle.com › products › deyrolle-a-cabinet-of-c... ) Deyrolle taxidermy display of creatures that will never breathe or walk again. The windows that are home to the natural and unnatural like the Glasgow Hunterian: Or maybe the Ponte Nossa Church where a five-hundred year old crocodile dangles from the rafters: (The Hunterian - University of GlasgowUniversity of Glasgowhttps://www.gla.ac.uk › hunterian Crocodile at the Santuario Madonna delle Lacrime ...Atlas Obscurahttps://www.atlasobscura.com › places › crocodile-at-the-...

Meeting up with such magnificence is a pronounced celebration: Pieces of history’s natural order or nature’s Darwinian lineage, is still never a eureka moment, but a powerful quiet understanding of what my camera must see going forward.

If you are looking at architecture any other way than a biological examination of the planet, then you might be missing the essence of not just the built environment, but the biological design of our lives, our cities: The cities are mechanisms: they function as a place like a hive: the buzzing is quite frightening and joyous: The life we engage from street to street: boulevards to the highways is what maintains for me a certain amount of sanity: It ain’t “Walden: but maybe something more reflective of who we are who we were and who we might become.

I see pictures and what I want from them: Cities shape architecture: architecture shapes cities: In the end, I dream that I will remain hopelessly curious.

The Architecture of Cities: To be Fearless

May 02, 2024

Fellini: ”…I am not directing the picture the picture is directing me: I only have to follow the picture…”

The dawn to midnight dreams begin: To be a nomad in the Cascadian wilderness: to arrive atop one of earth’s extraordinary mountain ranges.

Do you remember Steve McQueen straddling his motorcycle in the Great Escape: He throttled the “bike’s rpm past seven-thousand while contemplating the unattainable. The great Mountain Goat elevating his eyes atop thirteen thousand feet: poised cloven hooves and muscular calves and thighs sheared to near nakedness: Portraying a fearless agile ability to scramble: his eyes saw the unattainable was with in reach.

I have two or three dreams in hand that I have promised myself: I would not die gripping those last gasping grasping dreams before realizing the best that my photography has to offer is near.

Lifting my eyes: I was neither a precocious or ferocious child: I think from day one I tried to roll the dice and see where they may fall: The Bumper Car challenges at the Pacific Ocean ParkWikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Pacific_Ocean_Park amusement park was a last man standing event: No bawling allowed: Maybe that was when the lightbulb went off: How does a photographer manage a populated dense environment: Years later in cities like Mexico City, Dhaka,Tokyo,Sao Paulo I realized my childhood bumper car competition was a good primer for my life competing with the eyes of billions.

Philip Johnson and Mies Van der Rohe: Seagrams Building New York City

Then there was the Go-Cart racetrack: an urban desolate neighborhood where one could pretend to be somebody going fast to nowhere: The track was designed like a faux LeMans track: It was a nine year old’s dream into adulthood: Maybe Carlos Castaneda or Oscar Niemeyer began as well to dream at nine:

I had not thought of becoming a photographer then: I realized then that to win races I needed to look ahead: beyond the turns to navigate and comprehend what my eyes might see: Funny thing about the photographer’s skills to see the picture or the world beyond the moment and into the past and as one might suggest back to the future:

One may race the Oval track at The Brickyard in Indianapolis The cars are fast, and the skills apparent: Does one need to race in a circle like a hamster to change the way you see: does a camera see anything separate from the light before the twilight presents the end of the race: is there an elevation of vision that one might see evidence of fresh perspectives.

Debates are sometimes about converging and diverging ideas: The most beautiful Formula One Race track is possibly Belgian Grand Prix - F1 Race - Circuit de Spa-FrancorchampsFormula 1https://www.formula1.com › information resembles possibly a collection of secrets no matter how practiced you are at every turn: “Wow”! A mouthful of great visuals come to mind: Racing at great speeds: putting your life on the line to win: what a photographer needs to do to see what is beyond the next corner: to see where the light takes the camera: to live at at fast speeds not to get somewhere: but to live an experience before time runs out:

The game is only to live in your mind absorbing what is possible: but warp speed is what is necessary to get to those places so you can make the necessary determinations for what the eye may see.

A photographer spends a life time with a bob and weave move: He is at once Joe Frazier and Mike Tyson: protecting and attacking at all cost: Fearless comes to mind: feeling the danger and feeling the joy of being in the moments while chasing what you have not yet seen.

New York City 42nd street: Chrysler Building and…

When I was becoming a photographer I was like a minor August Sander: I was merely recording contemporary art history’s names and places: Moore, Miro, Noguchi, Dekooning, Warhol, Basquiat, Haring, Johns Lichtenstein, Cage, Cunningham, Bourgeoise, Krasner, Frankenthaler, Motherwell, Koons and thousands more: I was a recorder of time in my time.

Those images today look like refugees from another era: unbeknownst to the youthful eye I was having conversations with light: a child playing magic tricks with light.

Today, I pursue the light of architecture and architectures’ light: The influence growing up a photographer with artists minds in tow was a magical experiences Today I am recording a different type of reveal: I daily espy a constant splay of cinema in cinematic light: It only exists in my eyes: I will try and continue to share my visual experiences rounding turns and chasing Mountain Goats and the unattainable.

I have measured my heroes for a lifetime: To use the word extraordinary is not an easy utterance or a mere passing thought.

There are foot prints across cities and continents that may never be seen nor filled: This is the point I have realized that my photography is only partially about my camera: it is also about places and times never to be reconvened:

The numbers of a worlds’ disciplines that are homes to greatness are innumerable: Miles Davis trading with Coltrane: Ali sparring with the entire human race: Whales breaching across the Seven Seas: My Mountain goat teetering on life’s future end: These are good places to start.

How do I see this world: How will I capture a moment that lives in our future yet to be and in my history still not made: So lets continue:

Architecture of Cities: Truman Capote

April 25, 2024

Truman Capote is dead: The Slow loris observer of New York in modern times:

The magic is in what will be and certainly what was the night before: The moment begins with the arrival of the yellow taxi in the midst of a misty dawn;

The hovering mist waited not in the chords of Moon River, but more in John Cages ’4’33’: (John Cage once infused my mind with a tea teased with an herb or two: He begged me to listen to the silence). The shapely shadows formed by the morning sun impatiently waited to appear:

I remember Capote for many things but mostly for ”I am always drawn back to places where I have lived…”: Truman’s descriptive presence, visual stimuli encapsulates my past, present and futures in the unexpected : It is almost as if Capote saw Darwin’s evolution pinging between an urbanism imaginary sequences of time: Schulman and Golightly through a glimpse into a reflective black pane of glass saw their lives: It was a dialogue about needs: for me I morphed for a few seconds into natures’ Slow loris: My eyes widened as if my irises were magnetized to take in a history of visual experiences in a single frame:

I have been influenced by thousands of films: Breakfast at Tiffany’s is particular for me because the first thirty seconds or so not only highlight the talents of cinematographer Philip Lathrop e.g. (Touch of Evil, Cincinnati Kid, Point Blank) but moments that encapsulates narratives of my photography dreams:

For decades I have seen myself standing naked alongside Audrey and Holly: They both stood wearily remembering their dreams: The reflections show both women in Givenchy: But who wears it best: Holly/Audrey: tilted sunglasses: a nip at a pastry: a sip of coffee: the mere blackness Tiffany’s window holds framed for posturing: eyes momentarily laser in on the unattainable: dreams dance like water nymphs swimming within our life’s expectations. Thirty seconds of film doesn’t make a lifetime: Photographers are built to dream: to dream and to capture:

The Moon River that accompanies our eyes is not merely a soothing facilitator: It is about a passion for something that will unpredictably play in your life ahead:

When I photographed Kirk Douglas, I wished that he would have declared “I am Spartacus”. He will always be that power to the tenth for me: When I first saw Michael Caines Peachy in Kiplings’s The Man Who Would be King, I knew that a dream needed to be had not in life; but in the photographs I would need to make: Where would all of us be without Quixote: But then where would some of us be with out having seen the chords of Miles Davis rhapsodize are place and dreams: My end game is not to merely make photographs: the streets hold more mysteries than answers: my captures are merely present to illustrate the mysteries: People, places and of course architecture.

To this day I am amazed that a mere paragraph of Capote, a mere thirty seconds of Breakfast at Tiffany’s reminds me that I feel alive in a city that can feel like a continent of jungles:and I am a mere Slow loris living the life as if Jimmy Page was my personal minstrel through my cities.

The Architecture of Cities: The Primary Colors: Yellow

April 18, 2024

I have hundreds of thousands of visual diaries archived away. I am much more of a visual dreamer than I am a visual diarist: Maybe I am mostly a lion tamer of visual captures.

There is a primal scream that no known creature can hear it: The scream is engaged to a moment when I espy a capture: That moment will never be seen again in the same light: Then I feel the tingle: Then there is my yellow.

Photography’s vocabulary often sounds like a Winnie the Pooh cast of characters: Pooh, Eeyore, Kanga & Roo, Piglet, Tigger, Rabbit and Owl: somehow auditorily echo photography’s Saturation, Values, Hue, Red, Yellow and Blue. It is only natural that since my visual dreams live in a fictional world, my camera techniques must mimic an animated world of “disbelief”.

I am neither a scientist nor a mathematician: I am certainly not a realist: My problem with reality is that a mere six words enliven and dictate the science and math seen in the art of photography’s possibilities: I spend my mornings into my nights making pictures from dreams that may live beyond my time: I need more than six words to make captures.

There is yellow in architecture as there are yellow whales: A twenty-foot Cuvier beaked yellow whale was seen diving three-thousand feet into the darkness of an ocean: The intended dinner menu was a giant octopus with eight tremendous arms. As seen from a planet near Saturn the yellow whale appeared like a shooting star amidst a galaxy of seas as the octopus was schooning for safety.

The rare sighting sometimes invokes my own visual captures: sometimes I see something real: sometimes I see a fantasy in my frame: either way if truth be told: I have many dialogues with my cameras: How else would I capture the truest sense of what a photographer can be. My greatest confidant is myself:The voices in my mind triangulate between my ideas, my dreams and my captures: I know that all creations, all inventions and everything that begins with “A”: Anthropology Archaeology ,and Art continue with, “is there more”. There are a ton of nutty minds running around: How many admit to such lunacy.

Photography’s primaries: red, blue and yellow: enable my eyes to elevate my abilities to the tenth power. Yellow whispers: I am more interesting than red and blue: Yellow guides my eyes as I swim with my yellow whales: My eyes espy “The Yellow Submarine”: The yellow stars that fly above billions of Chinese: The yellow glow peyote induced spiritual reality experienced by the Great Plains Indians: Comanche, Kiowa: Cervantes’ Quixote struck out towards dreams beyond the yellow sun: The soft violent yellow mix of smoke seen enveloped in and around “Hell’s” notion of destruction of the World Trade Center “after the fall”:

Sometime in my past I saw the words on a book “I Am Curious Yellow”: Sometime after that I heard a minstrels’ Mellow Yellow: My eyes locked on to a vision of creamy icing waves highlighting the Hawaiian Island’s amber sunsets atop my Chantilly cake.

Presently Google Offices: Previously Hangar for The Spruce Goose

Yellow is a life force that brings a focus to my camera’s eye: Yellow will become an imprint that stays with me for lifetimes not yet lived.

I tip toed upon entering the California coastal Hercules IV airplane hanger for the “The Spruce Goose”: I glided atop a Tokyo subway station of illuminated steps: A glint of yellow begged my camera for the five-thousandth capture of New York’s Flatiron Building: Sir Norman Fosters’ Gherkin was seen as in a trapezoid with vaguely defined lines:

From Asia to Europe with stops in between my eyes see primary colors as a subject: Maybe that subject is the proliferation of vibrancy in my photography.

Century’s of art and architecture have formed how my vision could be: As the film of tears swims across the retina and more …I have realized that the colors of my photography, the significance of the color of photography never wavers.

Maybe it is my landing in a new city: Maybe it is revisiting an old urban friend: Maybe there is a blindness in my future: Maybe I make a duet dance among colorful prismatic displays of colors because as a science fiction writer may suggest: Because my whales await.

Sir Norman Foster’s London The Gherkin: 30 St Mary Axe and Swiss Re Building

The Architecture of Cities: Past and Futures

April 11, 2024

The Architecture of Cities: Past and Futures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Architecture of Cities: Primary Colors Something Blue: Frank Gehry

April 04, 2024

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:

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:

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

The Architecture of Cities: Walking Alone in Milan

March 28, 2024

Milano: Salone del Mobile Designed by Fouksas

It has been suggested that we should connect the dots from the past to the present: I suggest the present to the past:

When photography was new to me it was thrilling: I was never afraid but fearful of my curiosity: my camera was compelled to travel alone and peer down and across corridors: what was seen, never existed before that moment: my mind never had a story to tell until the eyes gazed upon the capture: what was not known became known when the shutter snapped.

My future is more exciting everyday forward than any day in my past.

My camera has become an encyclopedia of my history: and then there is always more.

Have you ever walked among the shadows of the jungle: the silent jungle lets out a scream: what is heard is the life and light of photography about to be: A lone person walks into an inhabited town: Milan: La Scala, cathedrals, monuments, Mussolini and more wave frantically to be acknowledged. They are posers that my camera has little interest in: If a city was only that without what captures the imagination then what would it be.

My feelings are interlocked in the details that captured my eyes before I blinked: nothing or nobody can be as remote and alarming to my sensibilities as Conrad’s “Kurtz” in Heart of Darkness: why would any discovery of self and city have to stare alone into the blackness of our minds? Maybe Plumpick in the “King of Hearts” film makes more sense to emulate: Some lunacy and confusion makes one ripe for new moments to be revealed.

When “aha” is bellowed from the rooftops the wonderment that steps before my eyes begs to be illuminated: The questions and reasons of a photographer’s purpose poses before the camera: The romance mo f photography is offered: Instead of “I am Spartacus”, for a few seconds I am Plumpick: My camera is my King of Hearts: My mind is swimming in animated nightmares: Only today do I look back and know that my decades have been a dream. I dream as I think I capture images as I dream

“Oh. I’m sleeping under strange, strange skies

Just another mad, mad day on the road”.

Rolling Stones: Moonlight Mile

Quasimodo rings the bell: I constantly whisper to myself to listen for the signs, the vibrations: the electrical vibes that signal the brain to “look”:

I discover the city as if floating through an aquarium naked for only the fish to see: I glance into the exhibitions as if I am peering through windows of discoveries like Christmas on fifth avenue or a laboratory of one thousand petri dishes floating in a petrified forest: The make up of what the city has been and might become hide in plain sight: Intimacy is an underrated word: My lens has never been about the spectacle of the grandeur: The capture of the intimate designs of the grand and of the small has attracted my lens for most of many decades.

I align my heart and lens with the songs of the whales of the seven seas: the currents carry the songs: We only know about the sounds if we listen: The sounds may travel great distances but they are intimate choruses that are heard by a few: It is how I reflect on my captures: They are part of cities universally: intimate images exist only if they are heard,captured.

Some things new will be old: They will live among treasures that I sometimes remember:

I dream of dancing naked among the whales to celebrate what my eyes may capture next.

Architecture of Cities: Primary Colors: Red

March 21, 2024

I have deliriously stitched together corners of a literary universe: somewhere between Laurence Sterne and Joan Didion, I have relentlessly pursued five hundred years of sentimental journeys of passion.

The most ambiguous question I have ever asked myself is: “Can I commune with my camera”. Or is it may I?

I am never sure if I am aware when and why I am communing. What poses before me I am certain is a capture of the heart: I constantly remind myself that the wonders of our histories are out there for the taking: the capture.

I adore the idea of communing with my past and history’s past: There is something about finding refuge in anothers’ past and integrating it into my present: It makes the photograph like a hub of a web connects a spiders’ universe. Before I was me I admired the minds and moments of others who communed with adversaries and ideas that in most ways are unmatched in our time: Aristotle communed with Alexander the Great: Aesop communed with fables: Thoreau communed with Walden: Kipling’s “…would be King” Daniel and Peachy might be my favorite example of communing: Oh for good measure, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Yorick’s skull: Cervantes’ Sanchez and Quixote makes sense as well.

It is merely a maybe that Ken Kesey’s communing with LSD reminds me of Brancusi’s communing with nature as he marched from Romania to France: is there such a thing as the bawdiest of communing?

I remember when I was one of Henri Matisse’s stark red naked dancers: My mind was joyfully filled with memories of photography’s history: My equally responsive habitués Roger Fenton, Charles Marville, Eduard Baldus and possibly one-hundred more joined hands with me, and have done so for decades: Their works triggered in me something about “happen upon” a capture is an elixir that has stayed with me for some decades: Learning to discover is what heaven is about.

The primary colors of photography: red, yellow and blue reside in my eyes: I utilize the colors as if I am conversing with the science of my photography: everyday the conversation changes as does the prominence of color that poses before me: I cannot have a favorite color: the spectrum of light and color is what makes the fun of my photography more engaging and equally elusive: I want to capture something or anything desperately: objectively it is difficult to always see what is before you.

London School of Economics and Political Science

When a single color winks at me from something hidden in plain sight I am ecstatic: When the color is integrated with the architecture at hand, I feel I have won some sort of victory: When I get to utilize all of the primary colors equally I feel as if I have won a victory.

My efforts to succeed do not know any limits: I have photographed buildings in zero degree temperatures: I have stood in five feet of snow: I scandalized myself by standing in a flood of perspiration as I begged for a sliver of shade in one-hundred degree weather: I have challenged all of the elements of a day and a night to make photography what it can be:

My entire career has been about how I commune with my friends from dancing naked across the planet and how I have found a voice to share with my camera.

“…If I want a crown I must go and hunt it for myself”.

Rudyard Kipling

Architecture of Cities: Places to Pray

March 14, 2024

Common prayer

The camera is an extremely subjective tool: The camera’s photographs are not objective: It is the eyes behind the camera that see what should be framed: those eyes can never see the entirety of what is in the frame: That frame is a funny truth: The truth can be mesmerizing.

Sometimes I hear the sounds of prayer: Sometimes I imagine the prayers are about salvation, hope and desires. I don’t know why I think this way? But why not.

I stand alone armed to expose what I see: Sometimes I will shoot the sounds that I may see: A mass of congregants can seem quite like John Schlesinger’s finale in “Day of the Locust”: or maybe like Terrence Malik’s pageantry of lonely willows of grass in need of company in “Days of Heaven”.

On more days than I would like to remember I have been truant from what I may call my photography regimen: I am lured sometimes by the sounds I do not hear but know they are to be heard. I merely imagine what billions of people are attracted to. I begin to feel a tonnage of guilty pleasures as I am trespassing into houses of prayer: I have no intention participating with the gods, priests or rabbis: I just want to photograph the sounds.

I have traveled to hundreds of cities with the intentions of photographing urban landscape and the voices who have created the way a city looks today: Imagined sounds of prayer touch my eyes: I am lured across cities and continents to where billions before me have gone: My camera travels past the native grounds of the Navajo: The churches that dominate Sugar Hill in Harlem, the synagogues of Florence Italy: The mosques of Istanbul: The temples of India and the gatherings in Samarkand and Bukhara. I have stood before Rafael Moneo’s Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles: I have gazed across 155th street in Harlem at the Greater Files Chapel Baptist: The Oldest Synagogues in New York wait for my return on Yom Kippur: Central Asia listens for when the American will return. I have photographed the kingdoms of prayer: The “houses” are not always about the greatness to behold but the beauty of the moment: the beauty of the travel: the beauty of merely being somewhere that offers a place to dream. I have made places of prayer an entire narrative: A volume of architectural world history.

Houses of prayer are more than curiosities of light and scope: the buildings are equally among the most and least conspicuous vivid examples of religions realm: To own a camera that travels the planet: To have a camera that can bear up to the eyes that ask “why is that camera pointed at me” is a an enjoyment that needs no explanation merely a smile.

An infinite amount of snaps are heard as I pace between the shadows and lights that make my photography: I live and harbor dreams inside of an emotional pendulum that play tricks on my memories and my realities:

There is no snippety-snap-snap when I am making these pictures: the houses of prayer devote their space to the practitioners and congregants. I point my lens: light and shape that reflects my capture. There is an empowerment to see: I often dance naked on top of whales of the seven seas: I celebrate: I acknowledge that I will never breathe long enough to see enough.

“Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood”.

Nina Simone