Architecture in Cities: Cities Interior Dreams

September 26, 2024

I find a human bone: I imagine a skeletal remain: My picture might begin: History stops time: My history makes the time I live in: Every picture is meant to see the snap that lives beyond today: I marry most natural sciences into a single engagement: I examine what poses before me: Generational experiences accompany my photography: My imaginations have value: I am learning to see: I need to explore moments: What becomes our history will be a mystery.

I imagine real time in faux speed: Imagine the Las Vegas Sphere: Imagine a single switch can stop time: A planetarium’s eyes site warp speeds on infinite galaxies: Imagine: Oh, to be a snail in fluids of consciousness streams:

I am pillowed in the shell of a snail: I move as if I am running: I am almost never running: My interior mind glossed in the riches of mother-of-pearl pools: It is an oasis where I can hide in plain sight: I attempt to examine the beauty that are my captures to be: My mind is in a hurry to be somewhere: My mind slows as in a snails shell to see: The beauty and rapture I capture are frozen moments captured in reflection: Comforted and glowing my mind awaits:

St. Nicholas National Shrine; Architect Santiago Calatrava New York City

I understand sanctuaries are not safe: We as in “all of us” cannot live in a cocoon where silence lives: Cameras need to explore beyond the comfort zones:

What would I do if a unique union of legions’ legends of Roman Praetorian Guards arrived before I successfully explored: I may have missed all that has been built: The built environment has to be seen if it is offered: A real world of fantasy might await: My mind’s home becomes an architectural investigation: It is where I seem to live: Legions of Praetorian Guards approach.

A panoramic view of my visual world awaits: I am at a snails pace: I near my private glory.

I may be Kafka’s Gregor in Metamorphosis: In plain sight I am seen and I see: A snail is merely a snail that not a soul sees: My visual luxuries become mine: I am alone with a view to be seen: My own orb, is a gloss of an interior snails’ shell: A home with a secret way of seeing:

Inside Heron Tower by KPF gazing at Norman Foster’s 30 St Mary Axe ( The Gherkin) in London

Interiors are mere shells of worlds we don’t see: They are our mother-of-pearls in some dreams: I see not with a pair of eyes: I see with recognition: I am never certain, what may be, what may become if you allow: The interiors of architecture are rarely acknowledged. I need to claim them for my cameras:

Towards my end I may sit as Kafka’s Gregor: My time will pass from view: Most built designs might vanish as well: I remind my life: I am alone: My eyes are confined in a dream: The dream may be real: My eyes espy millimeters: I make pictures that are almost pure: My mind may be sage: The sage for how life lives in the three tenses of time: The passages of time:

I am like most people: I live between what might be and what will be:

I am not Tennyson nor Ulysses: But I as a snail pillowed in confines such as iridescent lush of mother-of-pearl, I “…strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”.

I often recall my conversations I have with my eyes: It is never lonely: It is why so many decades moving forward I am rewarded with each capture: I hear the voices that structure my steps and my cameras’ settings: If I am to imagine what my past had been: I may imagine what my future may be: Is there a better way than through my twenty-millimeter-my forty-five-millimeter?

Nothing is better focused than a dream through a lens.

Snohetta inhabiting Philip Johnson in AT&T Building New York City

Architecture in Cities: Monuments and Memorials: Histories and Memories

September 19, 2024

Bangladesh: National Martyr’s Memorial: Designed by Syed Mainul Hossain

The entire planet is insignificant until we are not: The infinite worlds above we cannot count: We are small: All that resides above us is an infinite collection: Worlds never to be known, never to be known: Nothing is infinite below us: It is us: I celebrate the lives before my yesterday:

The imagined bend in the river mingles with Naipul’s A Bend in the River : The often considered narrative story and the imagined vanishing point lives in lives past and about: Its brilliance is brilliant: The closer we get to a reality the more we dream about what is beyond the bend:

The imagination may subjectively be about bending facts about fictions: The real vanishes as we move close and afar: The impossible becomes possible: Something becomes:

Journeys are often about what may be discovered: The dream of what may be discovered: The corners of the global planet are waiting:

Monuments and memorials are arguably about fractions: The fractions of our history’s population: The fractions of lives lost: mourned: celebrated:

A detail of; Harriet Feigenbaum’s “ Indifference to Injustice…Is the Gate to Hell : A reference to Auschwitz Partially liberated by the Ukrainian army
This sculpture is in Madison Park NYC on the Appellate Division Courthouse

Wim Wenders Wings of Desire approaches the separation between those who are us and those who are our past: Every which way you look at it; we are us:

We often lament what was once: We desire to have one more word: We have lost something someone from our past: We merely desire to meet again with: We have stories that are incomplete: We reach to lives past merely to touch: Touch their voices: We have heard the last words: We lend that story to those around us: Then there is the future’s share of this past: What monuments and memorials may be to some:

The death of the past is so much more interesting in hindsight: It offers us a key: That key allows us to unlock a sophisticated interlacing of our emotions entwined with man’s history and our own: An immersion of words and worlds; Emotions are linked to a woven weave of yesterday, tomorrow and today:

We entertain to visit monuments and memorials for numerous purposes: The purpose is central to “I”: Certainly we visit the dead: Certainly we speak to our histories: Certainly we may imagine: Certainly there is that moment: Certainly we hear the worst of our lament: Our sorrows are “us”:

I disappear to another capture: I often inadvertently visit the dead: The stone and earth you remember become my camera’s capture:

The many memorials and monuments are legacies to the revolutions of time: A record of life in frames: My camera allows me to expose the hidden discretions equally: I think with what my eyes might hear:

I remember ferrying across: Paris, Moscow, Kyiv, Berlin, Istanbul, Bangladesh, New Orleans, another fifty states, cities and various continents: Memories distort reality: Reality is mostly distorted:

I have never seen atrocities: I have seen notorious burial grounds: I have seen forgotten burial grounds: There upright somewhere in our minds are monuments and memorials to things we have seen, things we have dreamed: For something better and worse there is always more to remember.

There was a tectonic shake the night my grandfather was buried: The entire family laughed: Some joked that my grandfather, Lou, bellowed, ”tell me it ain’t true”. It was a certain end to a life lived.

I am neither an excavator or exhumer: I am neither an historian or anthropologist:

My camera merely allows me to see what might be a dig, a discovery or an invention:

The stories or less that I see are always present: Looking for a truth buried when it rises right below your eyes is what movies and novels are made from: The most exacting truth for me are my hours sitting alongside monuments of memorials, memorials monumental reliving lives that are not mine:

I know my history: I know how genuine the atrocities by demons before us have lived: I will never knowingly live in that arena:

The globe for me is too large to see in my lifetime: I carry with me from city to city memories of things: Chaos and more that I have imagined: Someone’s past, living or dead is a peek into history’s human behavior.

If you will consider that I have stood in front of ten thousand built environments: Then allow yourself to imagine how the minutes become hours; the hours become days; the days become years; my life becomes: My photography may only be beginning.

Robert E. Lee Monument: New Orleans, La (removed)

Architecture in Cities: A Point of View:

September 12, 2024

Thomas Heatherwick “The Vessel” Hudson Yards, New York City

I discovered the abyss from a perch above my precipice:

I have been perpetually sucked through voids of non pixilated color chromed fine grained embedded images: A lifetime of visual worlds not mine; But mine.

Rollercoasting in my interior-landscape: A former child’s toy chest: Vintage zoetropes providing the illusions of truth and dreams: Dreams in my colorful phantasm world I call my photography:

I fanatically decide what my subconscious sees: Might my moments suit my cameras; my lives past and ahead:

When I pass to my below or above I will have arrived at my lone own empyrean: A place where I can imagine every capture I have dreamed for:

I have stood alone with those at sea: Their ends might be known: They dreamed:

London: Architects Vino;y and Foster and more

Alone with discoverers I stood: Those who have seen what I know: They have seen where I have been: I have seen what I have dreamed: I know what is meant to be in a frame: My passion is about living in a cameras’ eye:

I am like seven billion others: I may not know them: I am like seven billion others who leave their homes every day: I live in their minds: They live in mine: I must consider every option: Their days are mine: All of my frames are steps to be made: I never make a photograph alone:

The self can be wickedly enlightening: I imagine I have learned how to see: I imagine the conversations with my other selves: There are voices that I may nod to: There are voices who just may be me:

One day more than four decades ago I happened upon the corners of four cities: I began with a photograph: I imagined blanketing entire cities with shutter-stops and single lens reflex:

I stood with the heroes of my time: The repetition of craft can be inspiring:

Casper David Friedrich posed boldly: The “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is not me: It is a mere place where I can dream alone: It might be a place where I can stand and see: The metaphors are almost reality: The voices of so many bring solace to my eyes above a precipice: My camera poses like Casper for the moment:

Most days I embark on not a journey but a suspension of disbelief: I stand where I can see south and north as one: Fifth Avenue beyond the Gilded Age: There is north: From somewhere on Forty-Second Street between Fifth Avenue and just shy of Madison Avenue the lens extends to possibly a Vanderbilt’s mansion: If the extension is south, it may be to a life among Rockefellers: Evolution of a city’s life continues to pace my lens past modernity until this very moment: Between what may you have seen and what may become like a commuter I embark and disembark: My daily visit with architecture lives: Built environments present themselves ahead and behind:

The one single moment in the one day among all of everything: I extend the known histories: Beyond possibly something London: Roads Portobello, Oxford, Carnaby, Piccadilly or something: Something beyond Paris: Baron Haussmann eyes the life before the Tower Eiffel:

Beyond something Los Angeles: The hybrid city is home to boulevards, streets, deserts and valleys: A metropolis with a modern search for identity:

Metropolis’s in twenty-four hours or a lifetime invite me back to empyrean vantage points where visual dreams are realized: I venture out to discover what others have shared and what I can see:

I track my eyes: I have an affinity for something: Something dazzling: Something mosaic: Something afar: Something iconic.

Change in cities, countries and continents isa constant: My camera can merely hold on to what might be the truth today: The evolution of cities seems through my lens to rotate and evolve faster than the planets axis rotation: I may only capture hours not seen by my seven billion: the moments are mere captures maybe never seen: My simple truth is the presence of architecture on my camera’s framed capture: My past is a constant melding with the present and future: The built environment presents itself like a strategic battleground: I cannot achieve all that I desire: My life filming our world is a puzzle living in a mixed bag of truths.

My very first photograph in Paris perched above the abyss on my precipice

Architecture in Cities: Paris and More

September 05, 2024

Christian de Portzamparc Architect: Cité de la musique Paris

Kipling’s If is heard loudly: Moments become encouragements: I play endlessly with more:

I cannot remember when I became a photographer: I merely remember speaking photography:

The history of photography may be begins in France: Paris at one time was the heart of all dreams sometimes seen and always heard: Photography’s romance transforms not a generation but in some form mankind’s reflection of ourselves: France is what I remember most: My camera romanced the pictures that would become: Paris romanced my eyes:

I am an army of one and millions when it comes to Mile Davis devotees: Sometimes I am an army of one when it comes to Dingo: The soundtrack plays to the pleasures of my life lived like no other: The story begins “down under” and concludes in Paris: If all cultural adventures ended in Paris how bad might that be: Dingo has become a type of epicenter, a quake that informs my photography: Like the photographer Saul Leiter said: “I don’t have a philosophy, I have a camera”: Dingo is a visual offering: The sounds perform for so many frames:

The beginning of something may be beginning of everything: The common meeting of minds for pleasures is what Paris was: I am not writing a history of a cultural world: It is merely an imagined fact: All minds interested went to Paris to breathe:

Jean Nouvel Architect: The Musée du Quai Brandy-Jacques Chirac: Paris

My camera’s thoughts always return to Walter Benjamin’s “Arcades”: The long ago razed arcades were homes to history’s busts of Caesar, Napoleon and Homer: The memories danced like children between kiosks: Eyes peered into reflections of my past and yours: Prisms of light played hide and seek among mirrored interiors: They became windows into how I might see me: My memories of a past I had never seen were living alone in the Arcades: The past is always near: What secrets there might be for our futures:

Remembered histories are what Benjamin shared: The histories that including this very day stand before me in every frame I have ever seen: Death, life, dreams and nightmares of centuries past: This is home to my cameras:

Miles Davis played sounds that invoked Ravel, Rachmaninoff and more: Never to compare the simplicity of what I do to the genius of Miles Davis: My eyes see history in a small way that Miles heard history in his sounds: My eyes never captured what Miles heard: He heard melodies and chords of cityscapes and endless seas and continents: I have only heard the pictures of Charles Marville, Atget, Lartigue, to name the minutest among my countless heroes from three centuries of photography:

Frank Gehry Architect: Interior detail: Fondation Louis Vuitton

I stand alone not watching the frivolity that may be Dingo: I stand alone to hear history in my mind: I merely need to discover away to record a world of history in a single frame: The passage of time illuminates and elicits the bit of insanity where all of my truths live: The goal is ahead: Everything that has past before me before I pass my dreams by:

My privilege to dream about my forever lives is an unsustainable dream: I carefully choose my music the way one would in a military march: The ancients pose with weapons drawn: A celebration of unity: Miles and me is not a bad way to dream about being aware: The song captures: My camera’s pace immersed into a soundtrack that only I can here: The birth of photography: The aftermath of every image as if at battle with myself: The need to conquer each moment: My camera lurches forward: Paris could be mine like it may have been for the ancients: The cycle recycles like a montage of all of the footsteps prior to mine: All of the histories lost in the arcades and in my mind: The privilege of beginning again: Benjamin is gone: Miles is gone: The music plays: I am here: Snippety-snap-snap.

Frank Gehry Architect: Fondation Louis Vuitton Detail Paris

Architecture of Cities: New and Old Voices

August 29, 2024

The Flatiron Building New York City: Architect Daniel Burnham

The other day I heard one of my cats cry out: I turned every which way to see both my boys:

They were gone: They had been missing in action for two and more years ago:

I often heard their voices as they scampered along: The wooden floors occasionally sounded like black and white ivories in the keys of life: The two boys always scampered: Their voices intermingled with mine: They are mine:

Inspiring as it is concerning: Sanity is overrated: Insanity is home to a bit more volume of clarity:

I merely had a few more things to say to them: They didn’t go into an afterlife: They merely live on in new light: My moments remind me of Max and Dash: Voices matter.

A photographer’s life is; can be a force of nature: Nothing replaces nature’s power in a career:

My eyes share the veritable truths in my genre. My cameras live in a bit of existentialism:

Dreams about reality mostly:

LAX: Los Angeles Airport: Architect Pereira and Luckman: Paul Williams and Welton Becket

There is always something dark about seeing the light ahead: It speaks to your angle of repose: The need to move forward: The urgency to capture many moments in various guises of light: My camera is only rewarded when my eyes secure the better imageries.

I have landed on lands far and near: My agenda is always to merely witness my architectural history, and remember my footprints: What stands: What was. What is coming: I arrive in familiar and foreign lands as explorers do:

A point of reference allows me to navigate my affinity for the symbolic nature of the four cardinal directions: We may be entwined with the mythology of the east’s blue dragon, the white tiger of the west, the red bird of the south or the dark entwined snake and tortoise of the north: Nothing sane matters because symbolism is what you borrow from it: The four cardinal directions may become dreams, energies and the coalescence of everything we hope to know to be truth and myth:

Madison Square Park: Architects tower left: Kohn Pedersen and Fox: Tower Right: Cetra Ruddy

I have imagined Hannibal, Caesar, Napoleon and the artist Brancusi: All figures entered metropolis’s like mountainous clouds of power: All spearheaded towards a symbolic North Star: A destination to guide their ambitions: They placed their ear to the ground: vibrations of cities rumbled before them: Something to behold: A capture was ahead: They all needed in some measure a beacon:

I, like my conquering adventurers enjoined the bearings ahead with my ambitions: I melded into a centrifugal force of animated holograms: My eyes, my galaxies, we marched: It is more city than country: More country than continent: More memories of dreams than realities:

The awe inspired, point to Van Allen’s Chrysler Building: The awe inspired, point to Louis Kahn’s National Assembly in Bangladesh: The awe inspired, point to India’s Taj Mhal: The awe inspired, point to Paris’ Norte Dame: Collectively the traveler through the modern and ancients avow that they have arrived: They step into New York, Dhaka, Agra and Paris: Monuments live in cities: Countries and continents: You breathe: The pleasures and adventures that await your eyes: The voices echo: Find your beacon and begin.

Voices vanish before we have fully heard: Our eyes suffer: The voices share: We may fully articulate what we see: Those voices: The evidence of life lived before: The life we need: We explore the intricacies of our histories:

Architecture is where the voices reside most acutely: Imagine: Brunelleschi might explain the steps to his Florentine Duomo: Imagine: Antoni Guadi might have shared the complexities of the Basilica de la Sagrada Familia church: Imagine:

Vanishing voices are the three dozen pritzker laureates before I met their accomplishments: Long before the numbers and the names my eyes floated like Tritons’: We engulfed the seven seas: History’s voices implored: Find your voice: Your voice will reign over your frames: Your photography voice will rise:

There will always be a new horizon: There will always be the built history: Until there isn’t: There will always be the voices that navigate the four cardinal directions: New myths will arise: New symbolism will be: My frames in cities, countries and continents will live for a bit:

Then there are my voices: My boys/cats.

Architect Rafael Viñoly: 277 Fifth Avenue

Architecture of Cities: Julius Shulman and the Light of My Moon

August 22, 2024

If Scout was a boy: Would Harper Lee have named him “Scout”: Maybe Gregory Peck knew the answer:

Scout’s inquisitive is mine: We merely share similar symbiotic curious curiosities: A history of curiosities have become truth seekers reality; Adventurer’s dreams: Everyone who sought the secrets that behold more are mine: I have made curiosities for days and decades: The cameras’ frames have become my curiosities:

The camera’s voice(s) I listen to are those of others melded into my moments: There are no audio serenades: I am merely a passenger: The paths my lens espies are mine: I am a passengering adventurer with no end in sight.

I no longer remember where I sat when I saw Georges Méliès A Trip to the Moon:

The moon is a place that my dreams travel to every day, every night: It has become my camera’s life: I track my watch until it seems to appear: A camera does not wait because it is lucky:

A camera waits because there are only a few truths in the science of photography: The art in architecture:

Decades ago I emerged from the most excruciatingly deliciously pleasurable mentorship that a person would enjoy: I remember almost forty-five years ago: I stood with the famous modernist photographer, Julius Shulman: I loaded the master’s eight by ten camera: The urban/rural mall waited: We waded in the heat’s heart for hours in the sun: He begged me to tell him what we were waiting for: My visual career was shaped by just one simple abstraction: Shulman never explained why we wait: He understood the delightful excruciating pleasures of the single capture:

He chortled for a few seconds: “Richard, shoot: Take the picture”: Today I know Shulman’s history explains why to wait, why we wait: My camera became a tool for my eyes: My camera sees before I do:

Oscar Niemeyer in Paris: The other light

I was once accused of being lucky at what I do: The circumstances of the shallow and narrow minded architects’ lack of perception burned in me for seconds: How could my camera be lucky: I subscribed to the urgency awaiting me: My lens was soon to freeze frame a moment: I waited for one more single capture: Days of storms filled the skies: Rain sent me to naked sheltering: Only a rainbow could save my days: The rainbow arrived: A dream became a reality: People cannot make sense of desires’ opportunities:

Luck is mankind’s religion. I remember: An Oscar Niemeyer temple of design awaited me in Los Angeles: I visited the clients home over several days: Their anxious voices wondered often: Often they wondered not what I may see: Their anxious minds wondered how I might see: I knew I had to capture more than Oscar had planned for: I had to capture enough: Some people know enough is when the camera can breathe: There is an entire exhale: The capture was near:

I voiced passionately, I needed the moon: When the moon arrived It arrived almost full: My eyes became filled with Hubbles’ galaxies: The entire moment’s second was measured in the skies hallucinogenic patterns:

I arrived for what only I needed to see: If Julius taught me one thing, he begged me to wait for the moon: I stood near to touch my George Méliès: My entire oeuvre is completely an adherent: I am a disciple to the light of moons:

The pictures that live in my memories may not fade yet: I still plead to remember when I first saw “A Trip to the Moon”: It underlines like some sort of historic fiction the histories of my moments:

My eyes have claimed the history that my camera has seen: I merrily selfishly need to reasonably record my futures’ present, and the presents’ past:

Days and years I have walked my cities: I remember my fellow travelers: The voices: The voices who have shaped my eyes: Everyday in truth and fiction voices remind me of my moon’s light:

I am neither a clever photographer nor a mere practitioner: I live within a known universe: I see all of the music that allows me to compose my time: My own moments.

Seville: Waiting for the light to expand for my camera

Architecture of Cities: Middle-Earth

August 15, 2024

#PeiCobbFreed Harry Cobb Architect #BankofChina #BryantPark

Middle-earth is home to mythologys’ truths:

Everything that you believe to be mythological is real.

Our world may begin with middle-earth: Volcanic surges aquifer floods:

Shards of glass propelled by steam elevating the nature of earth:

Earth bending shifts like tectonic plates afire:

Thirty-thousand feet below the known earth’s surface: There is more: The Kazumura Cave arises:

My eyes lift to witness the dance of the Sifaka: The Sifaka is not mythology: It rises to sounds possibly heard but never seen: It plays on my carousel of life’s pleasures:

There are no Tolkiens, Wells or Lewis’s in my world: No Sumerian, nor Celtic, nor Norse, nor Greek nor another mythological belief in my dreams: Here we are: I arrive at the intended:

I turn my back upon completion I think: I no longer wonder if the capture is made: I return to the dreams that are my truths:

Every dream begins with the begging for time: Not one for the origins of man, or something more outrageous to imagine: Something that might be built: When and where urban frontiers become our reality: Societies become our lives: My camera: It allows me to dream:

Architecture and Design #ArchitectureDesign

Where I may see time evolve: All of the good fortunes that I have been privy to began.

Myths of greatness in my land: Niemeyer, Hadid, Ando and:

The handshake from Oscar: The look of Zaha: The acquiescing Tadao: Imaginative ideas are manifested: My camera finds their offerings; Their ideas: I have my captures:

The beginning of time: The stopwatch signals how fast we need to move: We need to keep up with the myth of truths: From middle-earth to Venetian islands:

There is a tremendous moment: Something is special. Nothing so amazing as peace:

There is a quietude after I have made the final snap: The one where I return to earth’s corner: Where I first realized that this was my moment:

That is why I equate my mine with Middle-Earth: So much noise and cacophonous knowledge:

Suddenly vanishing in a freeze frame: Then I begin again.

Tadao Ando Architect Pulitzer Foundation St Louis

I have never completely understood why I travel: Certainly I realized that the frontage that extends beyond my door and marries the city beyond is quite enough: Yet, landing on unforeseen adventures changes that: More is so much more: It may be why I link my own mythology with to be told phenomenons afoot: How many environments have I made into something more than yesterday: It has nothing to do with me nor camera: I merely dream that in my moments there is more than what poses before me.

The cities and rural roads I have traveled have never been about my affinity for Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: Not tales of the “bardo” nor enigmatic primeval pictographs: I feel the ghosts of centuries past: That is enough: The photographs captured in real time are only a single frame: I am not returning to Rio, Dhaka, Dubai, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Mexico City, Helsinki, Moscow nor anywhere else for another Sunset Boulevard “close-up”:

When I make a capture my day is done: Whether it be night or day: The side-view glance tomorrow is not yesterday: That is where my fear comes from: My camera dreams of conquering the 60th,125th or other speed fractions: That is the entirety of an experience no matter the age of pyramids or contemporary achievements:

I am challenged by the genius of others: I beg myself to espy more discoveries: My camera becomes in various guises of age: Something more.

Architecture of Cities: More Secrets

August 08, 2024

A celluloid capture is a result of logging many hours: Consider the information your eyes gather in route: Two souls become: The iridescent deep blue whale gathers Krill-The pigmy marmoset evades the raptor:

Gusts of wind are heard: waves play off western cliffs: A universe floats above: The shadow of my marmoset dances: The stealth blue whale submarines ahead:

I begin to direct my camera east: My eyes are clipped open like Clockwork Orange’s Alex: Do I hear Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony or are my eyes attuned to something lilting softer:Joni’s Both Sides Now: Both are heard as if seen.

I know Los Angeles better than most: I know New York better than most: Most metropolises compel me to believe I am not in search, rather along for the ride:

Eyes ahead, we look south we gaze north: I am in the company of one: I could be in the company of millions:

My mother’s history is not mine: I look around the past: I imagine living in the present: I seek a future to become: My car pulls the roads forth: Dreams are realized: A mere seconds along the blvd: I am cushioned among two living histories: My mothers’ past is gone: Her share as we pause to go forward: We melodically are passengering to a place I may be looking for.

My dreams are always with eyes wide open: The fabulist in me mingles with the truth: Stars like satellites, real stars from the north illuminate the path: I am not chronicling every given moment along a blvd: This is a history of how cities seem in truth and fiction;

And the music plays.

My mother is today my guide to where families are from: The narrative like the navigation marry

as if one set of eyes are gangster like fast talking: The second set might pace voluminously like Lena Horne: Both sets are absorbing all as one history.

We were touring her first 20 odd years: All but two homes were captured: One might have been razed: The other was an apartment building that didn’t appeal to my sensibilities, but it was an image I should have snapped:

Los Angeles sometimes feels like you are living like a sardine on a highway: Everywhere to go everything to see: A little night music a bit of light: Back roads and over passes: Decades and almost centuries to capture: I shout Capitol Records: It might have been Disneyland or Mt Kilimanjaro: For my mother the narrator of this drive it did not matter:

Every home we passed was a landmark for conversational share: I would pull the car over: My mom would again query my interest in the history and stories: I would beg her to believe I was capturing a city: The story we made felt like a century of Scorsese and Coppola: D.W Griffith and John Ford: Cinematic storyboards became in my mother’s remembrances: Joan Didion’s murder and mayhem story from last week did not appear: Alas people were not murdering: families were sharing food and passionately appreciating getting ahead:

I found myself making stories in my mind about a city’s century: My mom continued: My mind continued photographing: My history melded with hers: I listened: My mother’s broadcast from her past now saddles alongside my camera’s present:

The pigmy marmoset scampers, the giant blue whale espies like a submarine: Slow and worthy my mother’s history is revealed:

I bring her eyes to my New York: Various elixirs celebrate the captures in two cities and one hundred cities:

My mother’s secrets certainly become mine: The capture of cities is illuminating in various guises:

Dreams with eyes wide open.

Finally we arrive at the furthest point east: In maybe ten-thousand words I might be able to share almost one-hundred and fifty years of urban rise: I park the car: I see what my mother saw of her shy century: I will as promised share the lasting century my camera has to reveal.

A dream of a view to a city: Los Angeles

Architecture of Cities: A Few Words From Joan Didion

August 01, 2024

Joan Didion reminded me a few times:

A few times our paths crossed: My portrait of John and Joan: Our origins: Our education: Our migration.

Oh, I have teamed up in some fashion with Homer, Shakespeare, Hemingway, Miller, Kerouac and others: I placed them deskside hidden and cushioned inside my cultural vaults: I rarely remember why I remember: I do feel more lucid when I need a dream about past literary influences: All of the words and volumes spin endlessly before my eyes: Have you ever seen electrolytes naked:

There was something about Joan: She was decades ahead of me: Her mind seemed to ghost mine: Maybe truthfully I ghosted her mind: We did not talk/walk in the same circles: We (my imaginary self suggests) did walk where the other had been yesterday or tomorrow:

Herzog and de Neuron Laban Dance Center: London

Joan Didion recounted a story that she knew about: I tried to match her step by step: Joan’s ideas were more furtive than mine: A church’s congregation may exude “thank god”:

She recounted a nineteen-sixties murder: It had a particular stranglehold on my mind: It might be as the muscular flex an anaconda might dictate how I might breathe: Seconds or a few days of sensational power overcame me, my eyes:

Joan’s peace and mayhem story had in a very abstract way become a template for how I see: Her stories stilled my heart: Close encounters of haloes hovered: Haloed lights illuminated a city: Joan navigated: I followed her eyes not merely in Los Angeles but in a significant way, across a planet:

The nineteen sixties murder was a very simple slash and decapitation assault:

The home was a corner lot with a freshly painted garden fence and proper garden that inferred an idyllic idealism habitation newly built Los Angeles future: The story wasn’t about an American housing moment: The story was about beyond the quiet was blood and death: Not a church mouse stirred: Not a single fallen leaf was heard: Death roamed on one side: My side was lily white and not a suspected stir from afar: Two sides lived: The clearly defined picture was almost Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now: Maybe more acutely referred to as the famous Christmas Truce: The World War One truce where enemies became friends: Both side witnessed a story of war and peace: On either side of a story are two sides: I realize every new moment about architecture has sides to share and sides to dream about: Dreams to be told dreams to live.

Photography and photography’s history are always upon me: I capture imaginations: I capture the images and angles of dream: A Didion whisper is heard:

So many sides: Where might I begin: Another secret: Familiar and unfamiliar places have been hallmarks of my career: Names have become visual laboratories for my cameras: New places of anonymity rise and fall before every shutter is heard: Secret names, secret places rule my past and future. Possibilities live: I have arrived at the homes of respectively very famous: I have arrived at the built environments of complete strangers: I tease eyes: My eyes are invited to possibilities: Witnesses may or may not see me coming: I am there: I am here:

Fascination is a demanding word: I am fascinated by what has been and what Joan Didion’s murder and mayhem allow me to dream to interpret: The photograph has not yet been made:

I am alone with Joan: Highway 101 slows as I near the LAX: Landing lights haloed over a city I have visited many audiences: What may be captured is side of architecture that has many sides: I am a lighted drone: Illumination dances: Multiply the experience exponentially and maybe we will see what I have come to know:

A single Joan Didion memory has allowed me to revel in my mysteries of photography: A universe of mysteries: A treasure trove of analytical perspectives: Ouija boards atop one-hundred cities:

Was the man in the Hightower revealed:

The promise of so many perspectives: The familiarity of the drama from above motivates me to my tomorrow.

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.