Remembering Artists from Another Time: Fernando Botero

Artist Fernando Botero in his studio: Pietrasanta, Italy

Truthful Fictions

There are three lines drawn in the sand. The wind blows, the lines scatter in the wind. Nature observes the fragile agreement. What will time remember? Maybe the transience of time and space.

“Will the wind remember

The names it has blown in the past?” — Jimi Hendrix

I merely urged my camera to explore the celluloid possibilities. I needed the adventure. I needed to cross boundaries in time and space. I needed to know what might be seen if I ventured across the dare. There is a purpose I imagine every day. If I cross over the line, a new discovery will be ahead. 

    I saw the great cannon in Jacques Offenbach’s operetta, “A Trip to the Moon”. An  adaptation of Jules Verne’s  “From Earth to the Moon”. In one morning witnessed nature’s ethereally hallucinogenic stark skyline, a whiteness of naked swans caressing Earth’s contours. I stood with photographer Edward Curtis and Director John Ford. The movie, The Searchers, played in my mind. John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards crossed the open plains of Monument Valley. 

 I spun the ideas, as if they were in my mind multicolored crinkled cellophane. I rotated my eyes, raised multiple cameras, and fired a single shutter speed as if into a Rubik’s Cube of all three imagined stories. I know the visual highlights were inviting me to seek what the other side had to offer. The necessary beauty of living.

    Fernando Botero, the Colombian artist, posed for me. The first time, he was like my Melville’s whale. There was always a whale of particular proportions in my scopes. I have met Botero in five or seven cities. In each city he greeted me as if I was the most important person in the room. When he extended his hand in friendship, I easily in mind recalled his friendship with Willem de Kooning: Botero described that moment as two artists from separate worlds with one idea in common. Art.

The success he built was celebrated by many. The man, the artist in my presence never walked with airs. It was his pleasure to take me by the hand. In my  imagined pirouette, ask me how I like what I see, how do I see his art.

It is impossible to define why my experience in one city was more entertaining than another. If I had to make a difficult choice I would say the Italian city Pietrasanta would be the winner.

Before I photographed his portrait, he invited me for a drive. He picked me up at my hotel and with not a word from me, he whole heartedly shared how happy he was to be in the car not touring but two people along for a ride from the small charm of one city to what I would consider the grand stories from Carrara Italy: The days from Michelangelo and the reminiscing of “The David” and more.

Botero in the Carrara Foundry shared at one time with Michelangelo

To like art, to love centuries of art in a moment. To feel you were sitting with DNA from Michelangelo to the contemporary Botero. Five or six of us had an impromptu picnic. To sit at a table with the stone carvers. To engage in broken English with the people who made marble dreams realized was my ”wow” factor.

A millennium of sculpture was born where I sat. Davids to my left, Boteros afar in the foundry. A wall (like an auto mechanics shop)  of magazine porn in every other direction. A slightly embarrassed photographer enjoyed the visuals.

After a few congenial snaps of the artist in his sculpture environment, Botero said, “andiamo”. 

We returned to his home atop a mountain bluff shaped like a cocked hat. It seemed that Botero led the troops in this small craftsman’s town of Pietrasanta. He was here, equally Caesar and Spartacus.

The portraits at his villa were like framing stills for the cinema. The artist and his work, the physical gestures with brush and paint. I felt I was a marauder wielding my camera equipment. I felt I was a guest. I felt I participated in the creative process. I was in a portal of discovery—a time machine.  For centuries Italy has embraced the burden of beasts who wanted to live as artists. These beasts live in her past and present. Fernando Botero is such a beast.

I could in memory clearly see the lines in the sands. There was a prevailing wind like a lilting Italian aria. Drifting through my snapshot of time spent with the artist. There was not a dance to be had, just a dream inhaled like Ahab spotting his white whale.

I have only been where my camera saw. I have never dreamed of another world. A symphony of ideas carries me into a calm within the urbanized frenzy. Not even silence is heard.

I knew and remember every single subject in view that my camera missed. It wasn’t the one that lured the eyes into the brightest solarium, the darkest den, the most colorful aquarium. It is not that another frame; I wouldn’t be successful. It is simply a story that is mine, captured as I crossed the lines in the metaphoric sand. 

Botero in his Paris Studio> It once belonged to the photographer Brassai

Remembering Artists From Another Time: Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat in Andy Warhol’s Studio

Truthful Fiction

I have always imagined ten and more Mantled Guereza monkeys nestled harmoniously atop an enormous Baobab Tree. The Tree of Life gave them sanctuary like a court of opinion with abacus beads heard sliding mathematics in real time.

Then I imagine:

The White Nile merges with the Blue Nile: Khartoum and more are forever beholden. The River Nile and Sir Richard Burton lead my eyes somewhere new. I dreamed in silence of carrying even one leg of photographer Carleton Watkins’ tripod as he sojourned across the American West. The unspoiled beauty of nature readied for its close-up. The  earth rotated. I wanted to feel the fear of breathing alone. Georgia O’Keeffe propped her easel in the tiny earthen landscapes, in quiet peace.

My world is empowered by the silence of creating. I am only aware when the Nile, the Yosemite, the Chihuahuan Desert spill out across the sky with stories we know yet never have known.

I press the shutter release on one or all three of my single-lens reflex cameras capture different voids in space.

Alone on an entire planet but emboldened by what Burton wrote, Watkins snapped his shutter-release ,and O’Keeffe gestured with a brushstroke towards the canvas. The planet is not a lonely place.

My camera is alone like a single vowel among twenty-six letters. I am alone with my army of single-lens reflex cameras in mind in spirit. Alone is an envious castle. Alone is a place of shattered nerves. It is a place to be emboldened by what happens at 1/30th of a second before, and a slightly larger fraction that follows.

I have spent endless days happily connecting the dots of my past, present and future. The days often remind me of games—Chess, Go, Dominoes and even Scrabble. I often utilize the nature of board games to connect my pictures to a meaning of sorts. Names like games, tiles and pawns are like my finite mirrors. They offer an explanation for my decades of photography. Whoever or whatever poses before my lens is not a game but an everlasting experience. In that respect, Jean-Michel was an exquisite player.

Jean-Michel Basquiat in Andy Warhol’s Studio

It was hard to believe Jean-Michel Basquiat was a historically famous genius when we first met. At Andy Warhol’s studio, Jean-Michel was not what I anticipated—He was just an eager kid with zero artifice.

The art dealer Leo Castelli had arranged the portrait session of Warhol. When I entered Warhol’s studio, Andy merely said to Jean-Michel, “He is here to shoot me”. Then Andy whispered to me, “would it be ok to shoot the two of us together”. For me, I knew I was being offered a bite into a slice of a delicious cake. I knew there was something more happening. I knew that my archives would forever be punctuated by “the moment”. Yet I still didn’t quite understand the fame game.

When I was alone with Basquiat he told me that “Andy said this was to be an important picture.” Somehow my mind spun like a top. Was I being manipulated? Nope! This kid, who was a few years younger than I, was just being himself. When I arrived a few days later to show him what I had captured, I felt that every bone in his body was transparent truth. We talked, we smoked a bit, laughed a lot, and made the most of good conversation and good company.

He invited me to join him across the street for a drink. There we sat at one round table. There was one unglamorous spill on the table, two chairs and one bottle of Stolichnaya Pertsovka Russian Peppered Vodka and some “smoke”. We poured shots of the 100-proof vodka. The conversation became quite animated. He knew artists were envious of his stardom.  Nobody wanted to be eclipsed from society’s eyes. He named names. It was clear that the fame game affected perceptions and relationships. I will not share who according to Jean-Michel needed to be close. Today it would not be fair to reveal the intimate exposures. Yes some pretty famous names.

Basquiat could have shared stories way beyond the a.m. hours. He knew a club or two he wanted to hang out at, but I needed a fresh-air experience. The bottle was empty. I thanked him for being so goddamn normal. I had stories to remember for a lifetime.

I walked home. Prostitutes lined the streets like Caesar’s Roman Legions saluting my endeavors. I absorbed hours of an artist revealing his art-world likes and dislikes. It did not matter if it was the vodka or the smoke, I enjoyed the reveals the revelations.I was able to relive the past few days of art-world royalty entering my mindset—Castelli, Warhol and Basquiat front and center. I was just a camera guy, but I felt I made a few captures I could talk about. I could privately celebrate a bit of art history.

Now, decades removed, I can do the dance I do when there is a bit of wind at my back.

There was no vast Nile River, towering Yosemite, or grand Chihuahuan Desert. There was a mere, intimate, vulnerable pose. Pieces of time lay before me, and behind me.

“There is no present or future

—only the past, happening 

over and over again—now.”

Eugene O’Neill, A Moon For the Misbegotten

Basquiat and Warhol

Remembering Artists From Another Time: David Hockney

David Hockney: Los Angeles California

Truthful Fiction

Buster Keaton sat atop the locomotive coupling rod in The General. Unexpectedly, the unexpected surprised. What followed was a hilarious adventure and a transcendental calm. For a moment, my eyes melded into Buster’s. For a mere few seconds of moving celluloid, our eyes shared a meditative pause, and  the entire universe was explained. I became acutely aware of the places between the worlds of fiction and nonfiction. 

Universes ablaze, everything that looks like harmony poses before my single reflex. Photography has never been about where I arrive at. I am telling a story that has not been seen yet. I sit, watching quietly and solemnly the world go by on my way to a destination. It is the middle ground that I see. The fantasies of what may become excite the camera’s lens. It is the lush life for the curious. It invites all eyes to hear the key (if you listen for the magic) of Billy Strayhorn’s Lush Life. It is a pace I can play in.

If you could see what my eyes think while en route to a capture-I often repeat these lines to myself as if I am alone with me, me, me. There is no eye in me, just me. There is often a bit of frivolity at play. I unintentionally try to freeze-frame every shift of light on the horizon. I unintentionally try to freeze-frame my life. I unintentionally absorb the meaning of every shapeshifter between here and there. I hold hostage one thousand stories to dream about on another day, in another repose, in a life ahead.

When I arrived at David Hockney’s home my mind went blank. For too many days before I tried to imagine the photograph I would snap. The opportunities to meet fame head on are rare. “What will I “do” with David? What will I do?”

I remember the architectural photographer Julius Shulman (who mentored me for a number of years) told me he could see David Hockney naked from his home. To this day, I doubt it. Julius had a bit of a children’s playpen in his mind. Plus, I have never seen the picture he claimed to have made. 

I remember standing at the front door waiting for David to bring me in. As one might imagine, I was thinking about the Shulman naked pic. I was thinking about every photographer I had admired. I was lifting my brain to the north just to understand what I would do with David.

The universe is a funny place to live in. It is impossible to know what will happen in the next moment. So when this pale, pale sweet man greeted me, all and any of my worst fears vanished. He was for the next few hours a prince.

As with just about everyone I have ever photographed, he wanted to hear about my experiences and the people we had in common. We talked about his friend R.B. Kitaj for an hour or so. We must have covered many more names and places, too - maybe another hour or more. I felt more like a button buck deer than an equal. He was charming , articulate and just the most friendly of subjects. I was an ordinary person with a camera.

We eventually entered his studio. He was very excited to show me a Chinese scroll on which he essentially based a significant body of work.

He had little interest in explaining anything about the dozen paintings in view. He wanted to unscroll this delicate eighteenth-century or earlier Chinese scroll. His voice was extraordinarily passionate. He pleaded with me to touch the imagery. I slightly caressed the scene. It was a guilty pleasure. “Do it again,” he laughed. My nerves danced. He laughed some more. The Chinese art was as beautiful as anything I had ever seen. Fragile and deliciously ornamental.

My natural light was almost hidden at this point. I asked David if it was time for me to leave. The day was long. I framed maybe a dozen pictures in my camera. There were many details and reflective moments of repose. They were for another time, possibly before they disappear from my memory.

A great morning and afternoon came to a close. As he walked me to my car, we shook hands. Before we  parted, he surprisingly gifted me some needed oxygen. He handed me a cassette tape of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor, Op.64. He whispered some generous and profound parting thoughts. I accelerated and found my way cruising atop the Hollywood canyons.

Today I played a Spotify version of Mendelssohn’s Concerto. I wanted to remind myself of what picture perfect sounds like in my eyes.

Remembering Artists From Another Time: Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol in his studio

Fictional Truths

My period of making portraits appear in the rear view mirror like a collection of rogues gallery and the inimitable. My camera has interacted with a lot of art, an army of artists, and art-world figures.

It is something that rests comfortably in the shadows of my archives.

One evening I huddled with cultural icons of another era: Senator Edward Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Andrew Wyeth and Andy Warhol. The Red Sea parted; the waltz of fame ensued, looking part Fantasia part Charlton Heston’s The Ten Commandments.

It was me being a Zelig for a few seconds. It was among a few days  which I was tapestried in moments, not mine. History is a home to many interpretations: I have an affinity to look back into my history through a slew of negatives and positives.

So many places and faces, I have spent years meandering silently aside the ancient and contemporary phenomena: The inside of my mind appears like a bountiful of holiday sparklers. In person I may appear  achingly shuffling like a Mynah bird in heat on heroin and steroidal treats. Yet it is merely me making sense of time behind my camera. So many types of fame in view, so much posturing. I do not belong, in milieus not mine. My future with celluloid captures was only a vehicle to somewhere. Somewhere is a place where a dream is a reality. Time is truly a slice of evidence.

I have traveled in ancient and contemporary architectural history:Turkey’s Basilica Cistern, Rome’s Aqua Virgo and Vicus Caprarius, Corbusier, Mies, Gehry and Oscar. I have composed apertures with a Kennedy, Miles, Warhol, Niemeyer, Hollywood’s Douglases, Astaire’s, and Kellys and other dream/reality milestones. The fame game became a stamp in time but not my camera’s intention. The intention was to feel a bit the earth’s rotation. It was great to be young and walking in history’s formidable footprints.

There was a man who knew everything about Bernini. I have never known the meaning of being an expert. I did not know him, but envied him. I dreamed  my camera might photograph the history of that knowledge. My camera would become an expert in all things seen. The man who knew everything about Bernini- -knew the secrets- - secret moments alone to caress the Berninis I merely imagined.

There was a time when everyone knew of Bernini. There was time when everyone knew of Andy Warhol. If Bernini was a populist pioneer, Warhol was a distant cousin. Bernini had the Pope and the Cardinal Borghese. Warhol had a different kind of guile for a different age. They were both icons of their times. They both blurred the lines of the private and public. They both dominated the visual culture. If imagined together I am certain it would have been a marriage of unconditional love.

For a time I merely wanted my camera to draw a visual line between the two. If the world could see my fingerprints atop the Berninis, they would see the evidence of the caress: The enviable position of caressing magic. If people could see the giant Andy Warhol painting of Mao Zedong in an art collector’s home, they would understand the furiously envious yelp heard throughout the home: I caressed the painting as if it was mine. Mao was mine for fractional seconds. I have spent a considerable amount of time caressing the brilliance of others.  

Warhol invited me to his Montauk estate. I dreamed that Bernini invited me to his Via della Mercede in Rome. In both matters I have and would have passed. I am not a mingler. I shared these fantasies with a famous art curator. He said “not to worry about mingling, you will find your special moments in time”. His good friend was a photographer of Donatello’s sculpture. The curator outrageously said that my portraits of artists remind him of those Donatello portraits: Light caressing life.

I told him that it is not about the light for me. I only wanted to be somewhere. He warned me about the necessity of patience. “You will be where need be in time”. There is never enough time, I thought.I told him that my light and the photographer’s Donatello light are not manufactured- -they come from a special place: From the wind of another time: A time when I might pause and press my fingers on greatness. I am an Ostrich…

Warhol near Union Square NYC Near his former studio

Remembering Artists From Another Time: Edward Dugmore

Artist Edward Dugmore in his studio

Fictional Truths

I have photographed many mid-20th-century artists; famous, interesting and artful. Those voices from my past haunt me like echoes from an asylum. Over time they have become a menagerie of mirages, one thousand fleeting floaters in the eyes. Maybe I am lost in a forgotten time a forgotten place in time but not in mind. My archives have revealed a life behind the camera. Pages alphabetized all in rows; glowing celluloid images reimagined in dreams. They fulfill and linger in my minds like a caress-able bevy of pillowy cygnets floating atop an entire planets estuaries. 

My portrait photography and architectural photography are in my cameras view like fraternal twins: through both I see my friends my history and stories told and to be told. 

Hand in hand they live as one: I mindfully approach both subjects with the same language, mentality and necessity to bend into the moment. Capturing a lifetime and everything imaginably alive before. Together they are my forever.

I have photographed many architectural feats. They have become  silent revelatory transcendental reminiscences: Volumes of imagery accompanying my mind while stridently shuffling along highways, roads and other conduits of time. My camera continues to ferry my life across many divides. 

The human poses are remarkably similar to the architectural poses I convene with. The memories of spaces in dimensions, the memories of people in spaces  - -My artists, my architecture, equally in mind appear imagined and real. Canvases conjured and canvases lived in: What kind of mind Is heard; how does the human eye dream differently from my camera lens. My camera attempts to travel effortlessly through Millenniums- -or so I dream. It is a quasi information highway that has an infinite amount of guile attached to it.

A  man, mind and time commingle.

Alone in the woods.

The car engine running. 

Nature majestically abound.

Locked in view is a mind alive alone frozen in time “Here I am,” is heard.  The quiet askance is not sad. 

Patiently behind the steering wheel a seventy year-old teenager smiles at the friends in the trees> A gleeful exuberance is imagined in the silent pose: He could never measure the pleasure of the escape into nature.

I could possibly imagine the Huck Finns, and Tom Sawyers gathering as in a sanctuary inside the old man who found a way away.

The unknown to a view, my camera has seen dementia just a few times. I imagined all of the artists’ painted expressionist abstractions, all of Clifford Still’s mentoring and mingling in the artists’ life: There is a dance in my mind: a witness to the celebration of art and nature- -maybe Matisse’s La Dansecomes to mind. The camera sees the humanity and sees the ghost of the past in the present:  

Balzac’s voluminous volumes could be comprised in the stories I imagined: Edward Dugmore alone in the vehicle until discovered: The artist trapped in mind and heaven: Nobody will know what the artist positioned behind the steering wheel thought. I know for my camera, it has never been about knowing the truth- -It has always been about communing within the interior of celluloid frames. This man/artist locked in the self: his voice heard in the woods and in mind.

The space of an artists studio, The spaces found in architecture are about understanding the equations: Measure what you see from the end of the lens to the abyss the viewfinder sees. I cannot ignore the beauty of sizing up the dimensions ahead as space in flux: I can only observe the realities I imagine. I utilize which discoveries speak to the experiences in my f/8 maybe f1/ exposures. My camera borrows imagined space to excel in freeze time.

Artist Edward Dugmore in his studio

Remembering Artists From Another Time: Andre Masson

Artist: Andre Masson: Paris, France

Fictional Truths

The cadence that belongs to the march of time- -the cadence of possibilities: Possibilities not mine but imagined in a city called Paris.

Every city has had a chronicler of sway: great cities big and small have had many strollers with eyes.  Paris’s history is like a voluminous waltz within moments of centrality and focus: Imagine if you try a chimpanzee atop a Parisian Metro sign. Imagine if you try, the nature of Paris that is real and elusive. There, forgotten and remembered memories pose for here and now. There is a unique cadence in every city on every planet- -Its rhythm is laced to the one or one hundred billion who have been or will be hurtled  through our universe or another’s.

The history of maps, are a map of men and women- -Today’s yesterdays have many maps. My day began at the former home of the dramatist’s Molière’s for lunch. The day partially ended at another moment- -The Surrealist André Masson hosted me for coffee, cake and a portrait session- -With links to Miro, Dali and Picasso my day became “…merrily, merrily, merrily merrily, Life is but a dream.” Another map to my future’s past.

From one arrondisement to another the stroll along Rue de Rivoli followed the sounds that paths made: I heard a collective of cadences: Maybe only Paris can mimic itself each day: Theirs is history I have listened to like an imaginary clock transporting through histories I have known histories I have dreamed about.

The way the streets look, as I stride, seemed to suspend time like a bridge over a real true to life folklore: The city streets feel and look like they are filled with armies of fashionable shapeshifters: In every direction, my lens follows, bending for my needs to capture what will be remembered as my Paris in that moment.

Once I left Molière’s on Rue de Richelieu, Rue de Rivoli and all of the built history ahead and behind looked like massive tiered towers tossed in and around my mind like globular clusters: Dazzled at least, every mason’s stone and design was distinguishable from another. I could not allow my pace to slow, my camera was in a hurry. 

I cannot be quite sure if my eyes or my camera co-opted Sir Isaac Newton’s theory of opticks. I was visually engaged to one of my favorite cities: My mind was in a brawl with my eyes: I wanted to stop and pose with everything that belongs to Paris. My eyes were happily blinded by the lights of colors refracted: If I toted Newton close to my ears he might have contended I was trying to draw the eyes into a single tunnel vision: He would be wrong. I needed to see the entire globe in a single frame.

I was flirting with exhaustion…happily so. It is the way I have always engaged the opportunity to make pictures: To imagine colors passing through prisms. My lens was glowing: Was I being too exuberant: 

There are thousands of people in my archives. My early days as a photographer were most rewarded for what the camera had to achieve.

Not an exposure has been made without Newtons’ Opticks in my subconscious: Imagine if you try what every capture may mean if wide angled prismatic distinctive points of view lived in your camera’s reality. Imagine my camera transferring all of man’s science and man’s discoveries of spectral light into a single frame.  Blame Newton if you must. The prismatic ride through a scope of time has been steroidal.

Alone in Paris. The corner of Rue de Rivoli arrives at Rue de Sévigné. I began at Rue de Richelieu. I have been lost in heaven wandering for nearly three hours. The massive tiered towers imagined have mostly vanished, faded from my imagination. A canopy of trees above waved some mist and sunshine in my direction: A coolness had arrived. The famous surrealist painter was just ahead. 

My decades sometimes imagined in mirrors of a carnival funhouse might invoke an illuminating story: Paris is home to many of my stories. My days and years adventuring in Paris have often seemed surreal at bedtime and in the morning rise.

I arrived at the home of Andre Masson: He welcomed me into his home. My camera and the ghost of Newton accompanied my moment. I prayed to successfully focus on a single frame.

Remembering Artists From Another Time: Joan Miró

Artist Joan Miro: Mallorca, Spain

Truthful Fictions

At times, the entire country of Spain feels as if Europe and the Africas’ loins are shrink-wrapped  into one remarkable  experience: To be surrounded by the inimitable scorched earth- -again: The Sun of Justice beds the El Solano: I am naked to the mind- -My DNA remains in full view splayed for all to see.

Giants- -art history’s gargantuas make for imaginary possibilities: They appear in my sky like jelly fish spanning seven oceans: A mercurial day in a human’s life is near. The cumulative effect from ageless experiences is near an end.

One day- - I realized Madrid is home to every chiaroscuro shadow I dreamed for: My intentions as in marriage are sincere: I stood face to face with the hotel’s ten-foot window: My eyes imagined a patterned sweeping view of Madrids’ city circle: I was on the phone with a well regarded New York art dealer of particular character: A gadfly of sorts to most but with me a sonorous revelation of intrigue; A chess piece (possibly a pawn) in the beginnings of America’s abstract expressionism- -the beginnings of modern America: The education of all things relevant to who I am feels self taught: The art dealer told me stories that altered my views, my understandings of mountains- - It was not unlike …White Elephants atop the horizons:

Madrid, imagined by me ferried among the streets many likenesses to John Singer Sargent’s “El Jaleo.” My art dealer hidden and costumed like Kiplings’ Peachey in The Man Who Would Be King among them: The entire Spanish population flamencoing in the blackness of the city. I made pictures.

The personal becomes emotional for many reasons: The autopilot in me was shifting speeds: I found more experiences truly kissing the eyes I imagined: Salvador Dali e.g., was a wish that only partially manifested.

Without hesitation I dream more surreal than I might imagine- - and again:  

Before I sun-tanned atop a hotel retreat in Mallorca: I was in a frenzied state of mind for more than one-thousand miles of travel: I assumed a brief suspension of chaos a few hours in the Prado Museum> I communed with heroes of another time: Then the the Turkish Coffee phenomenon kicked in: I remember driving and a bit more from Madrid to Barcelona, Port Lligat, Costa Bravo, Costa del Sol, Valencia to the unwelcome ferry to Mallorca. The geography I traveled across filled my mind with dreams I have never been prepared for: I saw cities and architecture-cities and citizens-cities and views of a landscape-cities and my own education of life to be…I could not relax waiting for my appointment: The days will always be remembered as if I was an alien my own planet: 

“Sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.”

Miles Davis.

The Miles’ wisdom to date has not quite touched me: I daily possibly hourly imagine traveling back in time many decades: I count each film/digital frame of a life time looking for the answers- - listening for who is to be myself: Then and for decades to follow, I was making pictures as only I could: I was not an alien anywhere when the camera led me to what would become>Maybe the greatest days then and now: 

Joan Miró opened his door for me: Something happened that I cannot interpret: I was photographing a particular kind of fame: I was living for a few seconds of a day in their- -the artists oxygen: I Inhaled and exhaled in the twilight of Surrealism: I was within arms distance of the magnificent: The figures in art history I have only dreamed about.

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty XXXVI

Architect: Ricardo Legorreta

Truthful Fictions

Why is it that everytime I land in a new…I remember part of a day with Dr. Geerat J. Vermeij.

He conjured for me a lure to scientific magnetism never before imagined: A science that awakened concepts for me  never before engaged: The captivating possibilities that his science introduced imaginary possibilities: The adventurisms in all of us- -me.

What I remember is like recalling a recording of a waltz: A crew of pink crustacean shells swayed in dance like a wealth of alchemy at my fingertips in mind and imaginary: Memory and touch joined forces to merely enrich and pave ahead for days and years.

Then ahead are the forensics that are like participatory friends. Making claims and sense of everything breathing life into a moment: “Over dramatic”? Not an inch: Take a peek at Antonioni’s L’Avventura: The stunning silence in search of answers: The lingering camera absorbing the eyes’ investigations into the past and the now: The weightlessness of feeling your way through a planets’ life forces may reveal the substantive window into our nascent beginnings:

Vermeij is a 97% blind paleoecologist and evolutionary biologist who through the heart of my eyes embedded in my camera’s fixations the most significant discoveries my camera has become: A tool to touch what a photograph can feel like:

As a scientist, Vermeij can mostly land on any shore adjacent to land and sea: The coast line of any of our shores textured touch of a rock, soil or shell identify where he is. I have always wanted the secrets of what we discover to be mine: Nobody we‘ll see what I see or the way I see- -something is there: Oh, how I try to see.

Histories can be realities yet to be imagined: A man has utilized his blind eyes to tell me the secrets that lie ahead and have always been just near.

My photographs will never replicate that level of sensory understanding: I have tasted too much of the modern world to fully understand the immersive journeys such as a Vermeij or others ventured. I have tried to linger like a Monarch roosting in their chrysalis: The atmospheric energy of another is a stimuli for the impossible: I willingly allow myself to follow in their contrails: My eyes enveloped for just an eternal nano second: A quieter space that most cannot see.

Los Ángeles County Museum…many moons ago

In the light of another country I will land. Light becomes an inexorable transformation: Compelled, mine eyes will adjust over time: Yet it is like scientific surrealism: The earth is round: The encumbrance of lights touch validates my neurosis in real time: Alone in Rio’s Copacabana, Shenzhen, Dhaka, Los Angeles and Copenhagen: My ears resonate with the unintended visual education from Dr Vermeij: I need the the idea of alone on an island surrounded by a textured life: I need the idea of the Crustacean sway: I need the captures to touch and then…Then like measuring Kelvins in the sky, the conundrum of touching lights’ balance of texture and heat profoundly affects the focus of today and the many tomorrows: 

Where were the whispers from architects, historians and everybody before me: Were there no warnings: How does one measure the depth of a conundrum: Without a second to wait most people can hear my Pentax explode on the streets of every place above and those to follow: In chess, Black follows White: In photography light and touch walk as one.

My Marriage of light and texture

Remembering Artists from Another Time: John Piper

H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and more remind my mind of past and future eras: My eyes are heard lifting time listlessly with a lilt: Something’s are meant to age. I remember the tectonic shift when the (YBAs)Young British Artists- - emerged like new born embryo’s at work: Raging through England and other nations:

My feet have always been steeped in the ideal marriages of antiquity and the flow of visual ideas that perform in our modern days. I have witnessed the cosmopolitan mingle with street urchins’ like torrential transformative transfusions of captures. My main interests lied in other generations- -generations past.

We drove from London through English folklore: The Thames slightly seen between the trees around the M4 route: Hillsides and electric silences felt in every glance: Histories pointed ahead: The Royal Family omnipresence seemed near “Windsor Court is just past there”.

I felt I was at play like a  child passenger- -amidst fairy tales and authorships not known: From London to Henley on the Thames- -Silence absorbed much of the unexpected: The dappled light through- - the Weeping Willows, Beech and legendary Oak hovered above: Imagine Miles Davis’ In A Silent Way courting my ideas as we traveled.

Mirage’s appear under different circumstances: Yet the black and brown silhouette of the Giant Cormorant moved without aid lording atop royal castles and unencumbering beauty: Nature is like a linguist fluent in the real and surreal: Beauty of the ordinary and sublime are equally worth living for.

We arrived in time for lunch: It seemed that a schedule of actions were arranged for me. An entire salmon poached and waiting: The Director of then famous Marlborough Gallery and Mr and Mrs John Piper treated me with a special delight: (It was John I was there to make photographs of: His wife Myfanwy, celebrated for her Librettos made with Benjamin Britten would have also made a nice partner in my session). The wine and get to know you chat was easy: Then time begged us to get a move on- -the schedule was predetermined. The bells heard was for each one of us to clear the table- -shooting time was limited.

John and I walked as adventuring partners into his barn/studio. I try and act sophisticated and knowledgeable when art poses: I was not prepared for the moment: My eyes softened: Twenty something and feeling so much younger:

At that time art to me was many things: Picasso’s Guernica at the MOMA: Whistlers at the Frick: Arts of Oceania at the Met. All of those museums were second homes to my photography routines: All of those institutions welcomed with “voila”.

I have photographed many famous and not so… in their studios. That day the very tangible surreal John Piper floored me: I would not elevate his significance but his presence is here inside me today: There were remnants of a man and his art as if he disappeared into his paintings everyday: The many ghosts of a man who mastered the acts of moving in and out of his art as if the canvas and the painter were one.

When we drove off I looked back at John and Myfanwy as lovers, friends, husband and wife: I saw them outside the barn chattering like two Myna Birds filled with excitement: They were another breed to my eyes:

It was an awakening that I fell in love with.

British Artist John Piper in his Studio: Henley on the Thames

Artist John Piper and his wife Myfanwy

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty XXXV

Architect: Santiago Calatrava in Milwaukee

Truthful Fiction

Reading is akin to love- -it is found, discovered like a romance nakedly displayed: The anticipated anticipations of fillingthe mind like a book nuanced with variables of intangibles mingling: Words of others indelibly scribed with not a black pool of vanishing ink in sight. 

My mind harnessed by extraordinary imaginary passions- -like dog-eared pages left by another, portraying a gift from anonymous ghosts in real time: 

In a Mexico hotel a guest of another kind unintentionally or not left me or another a book to possibly share a reasonable processing of the city’s culture.

A journalist in Moscow intentionally or not made a gift of an authored book to enlighten my visit: Days and nights of a nations’ histories accompanied my months…

Rain swept Stuttgart, Germany afforded me time to read books dedicated to my hotel rooms: No traces of elves nor Hare Krishna devotees could have managed better. 

In Paris, the entire city seemingly performing theatrically across from my 7th floor bathtub: In the moment I needed to hear a wee bit of English- -I accidentally found a perfectly bound companion stashed between my bathtub and the Contrevents/hinged shutters.

Hidden in plain sight: I suspect real people breathed a certain innocence into the eyes I have married:  The architecture of generations reveals guiding narratives like the dog eared books others left behind: left behind so great and innocent minds can point to where we live and yes, how.

Herbert Bayer: Santa Barbara, California

My eyes synthesize all matters related to what has become- -became: Buildings/structures left to tell a story where a matter of the beautiful and less lived and died: Industrialization of new worlds- -four walls forgotten in time and four walls with all the memories of vanishing times to be seen in my now!

I have stood adjacent to real time: I have embraced the realities in my moments: : The beauty of where I stand, I will not forget: Everything is bounding forward with all of the cracks and missteps that have been seen- -I realize whether I am near or afar myths are among my tales of tales.

At many intervals in time, architecture may be a best narrative for where we were/are: We stand in our feet before us: Lives lived in moments not seen- -there and here with you: In a moment if only for mine eyes- -Architecture may be like reading, akin to love.

W.B. Yeats’ Slouching towards Bethlehem speaks to my forever nightmares: The Ancients and the Modernists bundled together appear to have had a short life on earth: Compare them to the underfoot and the galaxies’ armies of other lives: You will feel how short time is truly- - It stirs my camera to hurry: I hurry with a frantic calm to capture those minutes- -lives before in part, my time becomes a vanishing twin…I was here but gone.

The Whitney Museum by Renzo Piano: New York City

I have stood on thousands of corners peering into the sounds of cities I have photographed: I almost always pause to shoot but more importantly I pause to consider what part of this moment will never be beyond today or tomorrow: My camera is set on motor drive: The  shutter-release has no choice but to capture my memories:

My day of reckoning was possibly when the great Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer grabbed my hand with two of his: The people in the studio froze and watched as we drew a picture as one: And again… It was a communal process where I realized the end is near and more is to follow: The rest of the story is my own folklore I share for another day.

I am completely filled with exuberance when I see tomorrow: The days when  I have  seen and hope to see again; Barcelona, Paris, Berlin, Rio a plethora of the “Americas’ entire asian influences and whatever the rest of the globe will allow:again: I am fortunate that  my cameras speak in many tongues: if you listen to what it shares:

A novel, a tome, some potent language from the Odyssey to the Wasteland books were always waiting for me: It was akin to love: Today, my eyes see architecture as kinships of the stories and myths I have embraced-- Like Orwell, my eyes are always on the road to…cities await.

Mercedes Museum, Stuttgart, Germany

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty XXXIV

London: Peckham Library: Architect: Will Alsop

Truthful Fiction

Guns and Bullets- -The abridged version: For more than a day I knew a war photographer: He shared the horrors’ and beauty of places traveled: He traveled in a time not mine: He measured the velocities and veracities of deaths: 

We sat in his convertible as he listened to an Egyptian radio station: Arabic songs pierced the sky: The middle of one thousand and more Connecticut trees whispered a set of calming notes: I couldn’t imagine a more amusing journey: traveling in unlikely geography.

I asked a collection bare bones questions: I wanted to know why he chose this angle, this repose to live as a photographer: “I am in Beirut today, Cairo tomorrow and for many yesterdays I was in places not remembered listening to one dozen foreign languages completely forgotten: I learned what I could as fast as I could: Bullets decorated the skies In every imaginable war torn environment. Lying often in wait for a recording of hell in time, I imagined to lower myself below the earth’s surface to hide from the worst unimaginable. I celebrate my days and nights- -This was the course I chose- -I was born to do …

Listening with eyes in the trees above- -feeling below the thrust of oceans’ afire, the earth’s mantle- - The tectonic plates grinding in motion: I was in and atop my very own Surrealistic Pillow.

Tokyo: The Yoyogi National Stadium: Architect: Kenzo Tange

The war photographer runs and rushes. My friend warns; “Stay your own course, this one for me is driving me crazy”.  We and friends rise from a cold semi-nude splash in the lake- -refreshed. I listened to everything- -I quickly realized that my evolutionary path was beginning anew.

My canvas is sharply different from my friend’s: I too run and rush: Thrust in a rush to see emblematic Tidal waves, volcanic eruptions and howl to the senses as aquifers flow underfoot- -I howl for more: I rush to this city, this address in a variety of panicking intentions until I am allowed to exhale: When I do catch my breath- -my eyes remember

Henry Miller: “… you live from moment to moment. So in doing that, this moment decides the next step: You shouldn’t be five steps ahead. Only the next one. If you can keep to that, you’ll always be alright”.

My days photographing architecture has become like a natural dose of lithium: It inhibits one from running and rushing: I am reminded that cities can wait- -even as the light of day and the calendar of years urges my speed demons to move along before I sleep beyond my life: It is a disease that daily rallies my mind and awakens my eyes: 

An interior moment inside New York’s Museum of Modern Art

Good fortunes though prevail: I wear a charm of dreamcatchers for good reason- -to commune with the eyes of others.

I am terribly interested in the history of everything above and below the earth: Where a certain history once stood once filled the air- -Where the Pyramids live: Where life in the deep are being discovered- -yet, The modern world is my fancy.

The eyes of others: Maybe Thom Mayne, Richard Meier, Bernard Tschumi, Charles Gwathmey and many more  come to mind: Standing with phone in hand as they explained how to see their designs: It is/was a privilege not to be denied: With their voices near, the modern world comes into view- - I am alive with feverish passions to capture: I will die before it is time but what a rush that awaits: I breathe in both directions: I grab the Henry Miller moments in my camera’s view- -A gossamer of ideas can be heard dancing atop my brains nerve endings…

New York: Sculpture meets Architecture: The Met Life Tower along Madison Square Park Dances with artist Charlotte Colbert’s “Chasing Rainbows” Sculpture

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty XXX111

New York State Appellate Division of the Supreme Court: New York City

Truthful Fictions

Michelangelo gave Rome’s Adam and God life’s gift of an invisible sacrament: The spark of the divine- -the  memorably memorable: The collaboratively greet- -is a greatness while in the residence of eyes not mine- -Mine eyes were not theirs: 

More than hundreds, yet Oscar Niemeyer, Philip Johnson, Frank Gehry, Richard Rogers, Paulo Mendes, Hans Hollein, Zaha Hadid too whispered while hands held: Moments constructed remembered profoundly: The unexpected delight (not on par within the “Chapel”) felt within abstract precisionism: My mind forever planted in furtive soils across the planets continents. The captures that became a hush: Moments with words of others. Those I have known, framed my contributions to architecture’s photography.

The Moment

“The moment when, after many years of hard work and a long voyage you stand in the centre of your room, house, half-acre, square mile, island, country, knowing at last how you got there, and say, I own this…”

Margaret Atwood

New York City: Frank Gehry meets Annabelle Selldorf meets Shigeru Ban

I imagine Ms. Atwood equally running with hair in the wind, joy in the field of lilies…floating with forlorn as if Marc Chagall’s Bella in “Nocturne.” The imaginary sight might remind me of sounds to follow: Momentary moments are spoken: We, here, listen as one, two expressions of moments to live by: My camera hears sounds a wee bit differently than the Atwood “speak”. 

 Brief, the briefest of thoughts my camera recalls: Yet the enlightenment that is Andrei Tarkovsky leaves me  mingling within the reflective moments home to The Mirror: His moments of reminiscing of emotional sightings skyward; reflect those someone elses- -Not mine. The force of their aesthetic contributions resonated and will resonate until…:

Coping with moment’s time lost to history and horizons is freakish in part because of the commons: It is common for men and women, communities and  communities of architecture to vanish in the same way that “Tongues”- -languages of history are no longer spoken: Languages in hands not mine: Voices reminded of the ancients- - ancient languages vanishing and vanished: The need to be resurrected is a memory: Like architecture there is an emptiness not to be recalled or remembered>my camera with efforts attempts to record before that black hole swallows the memories entirely among us. Affected I was, I am: Voices carried- -ears remembered, the distant distance ahead: A limited caw of a bird splayed in song hardly remembered.

NYC: Virgin Hotel meets the Collegiate Marble Church

The faces in large and even larger formats became calculated captures of time built by geniuses of another mind: I reasonably attack with exaggerated passions utilizing the widest lenses, apertures to capture the expanse that become expansive ideas, architecture’s details. 

One afternoon Oscar Niemeyer embraced my hands: The other aforementioned architects did the same: Certainly with a different gesture to follow: They acknowledged what I do- -Yet my eyes (as my eyes often do) caught a glimpse of another thought: “This is a mere idea: You must understand the architecture I made: Now allow your lens to pursue it with good fortunes.

My journey has not been episodic nor Pilgrim’s Progress narrative: The camera’s dreamery  that is my imaginary place is where the very hush originates: The captures become.

New York City: 42nd street convergence of …

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty XXX11

Just a Dream

Truthful Fiction

On a lazy afternoon I stood (gazing) atop of earth’s unique crustal fault: A spectral spectrum of colors enjoined the planet with the universe. Native dances ensued: I peed into the rain: An unflappably impressive building waved hello:

Miles Davis: “Sometimes it takes a long time to sound like yourself”.

We have always needed science and math problem solving to make creative executions: Problem solving: William Shakespeare: Searched for reliable prominence to print indelibly of indelible utilized chemical processes to create black ink with plentiful of Oak gall: Albrecht Dürer: Scoured and sourced from apothecaries and mines colorful producing pigments to paint colors: Miles Davis didn’t need the the chemical process to create: He merely needed his heart and ears to produce alchemic creative sounds: The link? Three geniuses made the imaginary real by mixing quantitative amounts of curiosity between their fingers: There is no art without science and math: 

Cannon Street Station London

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and Miles Davis often come to mind while I imagine the dreamery that are my cameras’ place of perspective. Cervantes and Davis- -voices like no others: A permanence on this planet: They take you places that few can imagine until- -you listen as the language plays: 

I have looked for a window into their lives- -I have delved into their spaces: I have taken a measurable account into their darkest and brightest lights: Their stories. It is not a journey for enlightenment: It is a mere place to live with inspiration: The result is not about finding a sound or challenging a windmill- -just a happy place.

When I think about photography, the photography of architecture and more…I often walk into the set of Bad Day at Black Rock: The desert captured in picturesque Panavision: The empowered din of tremors looms overhead: My mind roams into places experiencing a real life satori encased in a fictional reality. It allows me to trace my memories, my days that have become years: 

Broad Museum: Los Angeles: Diller and Scofidio Architects

I have seen thousands of architectural designs posing: Posing for my camera: The hundreds of thousands of frames stilled in my light are about my heart: The images were made from ideas- -potions that became reality: Mathematical equations informed the mechanical science that is photography: Attached to the equations are dreams of dark and light fractions: Darkened streets, lighted colors- -Adventure of worthwhile dimensions awaits: I will never travel enough: I travel to realize dreams: I travel to see stories about realities: Dreamers live in reality to become: The camera attempts to make sense of what it sees: I follow.

Photography is a science and math problem: The camera lives within a single envelope of a story that opens in a single frame: The earth that lies below is an underground sanctuary: The stories that my camera sees above and beyond is where my captures live in panavision: a widened and wider view that my camera allows:

Imagine multiplying camera frames by the hundreds of thousands: They for my formats are inviting fantasies: The Tolkien kind- -The Lewis Carroll kind- -The Cervantes and more: The camera poses for the closeup, for my eyes: Miles Davis: “Sometimes it takes a long time to sound like yourself”.

Architect: Zaha Hadid: London Aquatics Center

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty XXX1

Details: The New New Museums:Architect SANAA on the left: Architect OMA and Shohei Shigematsu on the right

Truthful Fiction

 I knew I was dreaming while cityscaping. My mind wandered celestially. Contrails soared equally across the winter and Indian Summer skies: I never wanted to be on the receiving end of the word of the world: I never imagined to be seen as the great Khan, the great Kublai Khan hearing stories about worlds- -a world I knew nothing about. I wanted to be Italo Calvino in the guise of the real and fictitious Marco Polo dispensing truths and fictions for others to imagine.

Dreams are laid bare to be foretold: The illusion that memory’s fade is false: They live in personal curatorial revisionisms: Rewinds in real time: Everything we knew we know: Just press replay format: Everything is remembered differently: Pictures remember the facts.

The first glimpse of any new city is a contagious hello: Stepping off of a train, out of an airplane, out of a car, away from the space shuttle, lilting away from Mars reveal refreshingly new exposures: The camera articulately calibrates: There will be no optical illusions only optical allusions: 

The camera is not a diarist: it is akin to antiquity’s card catalog: A critical and definitive archive of  evidence hidden in a forever space capsule: The eternal archive will  be a reference to where, when, and why my camera lived:

I have tried to explain for decades the mechanical camera’s emotional eyes: The emotions it ponders and manners: The camera resides in its own auto-motor-drive:  Analog and digital functions maintain an Hello mode: The fleeting sensation that we all remember as our first. The camera witnesses the emotional high and low perspectives that are us: The camera nails down the emotional experience of the new- -The tenuous tensions are like a morning with Aspergers’. Like walking a tightrope on a single toe nail- - a gift of life- - like surviving a churning hundred-foot Nazaré monster: Inhale- -life and death are only separated by a hiccup in the aorta.

Grasping for anything and everything in Bangladesh

The camera never decides what will be the first picture: It is alerted to what it knows:  In case there is no return- -an entire city canvas becomes a single frame like a woodcut with an infinite amount of layers- -the permanence within the impermanence moments: History in a frame- - years, days, seconds and fractions.

Hello and goodbye are bookends: The two words frame the life at the beginning and the one before the end: They remind me of  times not always remembered: Winter, freezes whispering of an end: “Goodbye” appears like a Goshawk nakedly moulting in private: Goodbye to the past hello to the future: Oh to be a witness  to our beginnings and what transpires…

It can be nerve-wracking not to know if the the new friend- -the city will remain: It can be nerve- wracking if it may be the last time you see the friend- - the city:

converging shapes and colors in Barcelona

Every afoot, every glimpse is a reminder of the the fragility that is ahead and behind.

In Jaipur, India I had a nightmare naked: My mind appeared naked: My eyes were naked: Natures’ best and a nature not known were too- -naked. The wheels under moving along quite quickly froze as did earth for the cover of the Good Earth Catalog: All the possible imaginations hidden in plain naked sight: The eyes paused to see the raw: to see what I saw.

A woman by the river legs crossed in a colored cotton red sheath prayed: Her breath found in white- -also frozen: I watched as she doused in oils the seemingly dead body wrapped in a white sheet: A flame a sacrifice with prayers abound were now and near:  Her world not mine: My camera said hello and …I promised that day: Not a frame would pass without a capture ever again: There must be a beginning and an end to every capture: A single frame at best: The image haunts…not for what it was but for what the camera remembers:

I want to dance with Beatrice Potter, C.S. Lewis, George Orwell, Lewis Carroll J.M.Barrie

and the clans of those who give a voice to the unimaginable. What we hear are what our eyes see what we see are the voices afoot: Afoot in the hundred or so cities tucked into the archives numbering hundreds of thousands, now.

The Albertine Book Store in New York City

Architecture of Cities: Mapping BeautyXXX

Rotterdam Photo Museum and more

Truthful Fiction

Three four-foot tall White Storks clothed militarily in Blue Evening Mess lingered against the barn facade: Their colored beaks nodded in my direction: Their farmer indifferent to my amazement postured alongside: The rest of the earths’ inhabitants by contrast appeared naked.

I with immeasurable angst tried to thrust my head out of the train window: My eyes paused: I wanted to take a few two-steps across the fields to examine the truth: If only there was any humanity within view to measure scale and weigh disbelief: I may have been hallucinating: The urgency to pull the emergency stop cord flustered my mind: It is apparent that all of my days recording life through railway windows have seemed dreamily like another’s life: This sighting was an unutterable fascination that will never be relived: The moment - -mine but not for another day. I pressed my eye lids open and shut and repeated: The equally frightening and beautiful beasts had vanished in plain sight> My life is fraught with fear that another moment will be missed: if only I knew how to capture everything my mind conjures and my eyes see.

The opening credits of Casablanca features an illustrated map of Africa. I imagined a similar type of map for my travels through Belgium and the Netherlands: Follow my days, follow my years: The dots could become a human with all circuits ablaze…a real life imaginary Georges Seurat Pointillist canvas: It is not quite the pleasure of visiting a true to form Seurat, yet it could be like reading in Braille: I don’t have to see where I have been: I can manner a touchstone.

Luxor Theater:Rotterdan

I was flying from Amsterdam to Bruges courtesy the Eurostar train. My entire Amsterdam to Bruges trip reminded me of an M.C Escher tapestry- -Every sighting every dream appeared like optical illusions: So much beauty, so much history, so many discoveries defined my experiences: The sunlight and the darkness constantly dancing in frames- - architecture living abound combing parts in the streets and highways: Stories atop canvases manifested.

Amsterdam can be a haven for introspective solitude and then there is everything else it is: I stood in front of Anne Frank’s home: My camera lens caught the giant Westerkerk Church prominently near by. I was experiencing an abbreviated version of Hannah Arendt at Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem- -Lee Miller’s experience in Hitler’s bathtub: I was communing with the past- - with history and voices that are not mine- -but a collective of convenient experiences to elevate my engagements to feel like each day I was levitating. Maybe it was the Betty Blu puff or two: Maybe it was just living with Rembrandt and Van Gogh: I was photographing a momentary life.

Toyo Ito Pavillion in Bruges, Belgium

Every city introduces me to a present, past and at times a future to dream about.

I still carry close to my heart the brilliance of Albrecht Dürer’s whale. My mind is often on my way to Zeeland when I arrive in Rotterdam: There in Rotterdam is the kingdom that is Rem Koolhaas: The  interesting if not brilliant architects and architecture there to address:

Slowly the train winds down and through The Hague: Later at maximum speed I land in Belgium’s Bruges: My final but lasting destination is Toyo Ito’s Pavillion: Against the backdrop of the Bruges City Hall I realized that 256 km or 150 miles flashes by like cheat notes in a debate: 

An immense travel log is lodged somewhere in my brain: A place for my eyes to blaze and rest in the unfettered wilderness that is my career: Each day blind enthusiasm determined my bearings- -Never lost- - but here and there. 

Rem Koolhaas De Rotterdam skyscraper

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty XXIX

A collective of New York buildings

Truthful Fiction

The Brazilian film “City of God” remains for many reasons locked in my mind- -front and center: It is the tiny idea that in a gigantic earth is a whisper of a visual concept- - standing for almost every photograph I make- -It reminds my camera that every city  frames a repeating dream a repeating nightmare: Something is happening: I cannot determine unless I land in the center of the action: The action is silent and yet volatile:  My camera needs to be there forever and ever: A capture- -my capture needs to be made to fill the voids- -fill the space between here and there. 

Every city reminds of “City…”The unknown elevates the senses: It is a prickly sensation that surges to the tips of a mass of nerve endings: Visions in the dark, shadows in my vision invoke such likely narratives broadly spaced from Jack the Ripper to space exploration: The unknown is where my camera resides when not abound.

A single nightmare: Imagine rotary wings above. Something apocalyptic something now. Collective thumps hovering:  Rio de Janeiro’s favela/ghetto beckons below: The helicopter pilot wishes to lower me: He mimes a shouldered missle launcher: For a nano second I am part of some thrilling adventure:

Tokyo’s Apple Store

Dangers of the massive unknown pose in unfathomable quietude: My camera salivates around and about the possibilities: Christ the Redeemer stands atop Corcovado Mountain: Shadowy missives appear: A massive collective of danger is imagined: I want to lean below the landing skids to clearly see: I am locked in but need to free fall: I have pictures to make: Rio could be mine in a single shutter release.

The idea of idyllic cinematic scenic backdrops as in movie magic Black Narcissus appear: Ideas saturated in colors: Ideas dyed as in autochrome: One by one, images flash and more imaginary follow: I am seen conjuring the possibilities as Einstein may calculate equations: To be alive to make something fresh. A few thousand feet above sea level my feet dance tap like Bill “Bojangles” Robinson: So many voids to fill: So many historical shadowy voids below to account for within a single frame: 

New York’s Empire State Building and iconic New Yorker sign and much more

I have imagined cities built through the centuries: They arrived in mind, pixelated in shadowy colors mimicking time-lapse photography filling the voids of time and history:

I race to fend off Eugene O’Neil’s, “There is no present or future—only the past, happening over and over again—now.” I will not allow that to be the case: I need to imagine more: I need each city to be new: I need to be presented with a new light a new approach a newer than new capture: 

I am almost always dreaming  the impossible: I measure my years in cameras’ fractions: I have little time to review my life or the history of the planet in my rear view- -I am starved for a lasting memory- -A place where adventures were had- -a place that lies ahead:

Tokyo: The National Museum of Modern Art

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty XXV111

Architect: Oscar Niemeyer: Los Angeles 1963

Truthful Fictions

I have loved three paintings in my life: I have admired many more: The three paintings I have loved framed my photographic ideas subliminally- - truthful fictions followed: Arnold Böcklin’s first Isle of the Dead  introduced my eyes (along with the two other paintings/artists) to what I needed my photography to appear like: The three paintings were like realizing for the first time that life starts as an embryo: The three paintings became my DNA before I became aware of what I wanted not merely from photography- - but from the life of a photographer: The life of a photographer was to be how and where I made photographs: Where and why I traveled: The collective immersion of place and time: The pragmatism and adventurism that I wanted to have seen in celluloid: The invention of character in what the camera saw.

Every day became a dream sequence almost like a seance: I Imagined traveling the lost Apacheria of the Apache Indians: I Imagined standing upright to the sounds of the Tate /Manson Los Angeles nightmare: I Imagined the first sight of Vesuvius’ lava flow upon Pompeii: Yes, if you will allow yourself to imagine somewhere before you were here or there- -reality raises its beautiful head. Dangerous thoroughly joyful experiences become visual comfort:

Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright: Carmel, California

The visual comfort that I first recognized in Böcklins’ Isle of the Dead was the necessary technique of imagery I needed to aspire towards: I tried to marry the technical and the journey: It would be like a diary of the Monarch Butterflies migration: If I only admired the wings in motion I could write one million words about the urgency of flight the pleasures of destinations and the experiences of captures: I wanted to join in the flight: I wanted to be a part of the phenomenon that is referred to as a kaleidoscope and be apart of the flutter.

For decades I didn’t merely release my camera’s shutter apparatus- -I was somewhere> That somewhere always reminded me of Böcklin’s “…Dead”. The romance and the journey was certainly more important than the capture- -until the reverse became the greater truth.

All the homes I have seen through the wide and narrow aperture’s has become my own personal romance novel: A story resides in the not the just captured moments: But a place that was us before now.

Architect: Charles Gwathmey: Malibu California

Alone in my mind is where I am never alone: It is why the three paintings ride with me: There is no fabrication in this set of concepts: It is equal to Melville’s Ahab, or Albrecht Dürer’s whale: There is a quest for reality: There is no time to die in imaginations: It is a quest to capture in flight a lifetime of experiences: Spend a minute in a torrent of Celtic Myths: Listen to the pleasures of Homer’s Sirens: Stand toe to toe with Rabelais’s Gargantua: I am alone in my mind with Böcklin’s “…Dead” yet my reality is seen framing a design by Oscar Niemeyer, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ricardo Bofil, Philip Johnson and more than one-hundred thousand real moments. I stand straddled across one thousand cities just listening for the conversations among the ghosts who were here before now.

Architect: Ricardo Bofill: Barcelona, Spain

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty XXV11

An afternoon with a Guggenheim

Truthful Fictions

 My continuous affliction: A companion of constant amusement: My nightmares appears: Awakening to eyes in panic mode: The fractional psychosis that is eternally embedded is part “…Cuckoo’s Nest”, part a little bit of heaven. Not a moment passes when I am not acutely aware of a photograph(s)to be made. My eyes arrive each morning and depart each evening: The slow contemplative and the reflexes on steroids expose daily captures. The choreography begs to be seen.

I experience accelerative movements in most cities and countries. My eyes cozy behind the black curtains- -The home of shutter-releases heard at one thousandth or three or four seconds. It may be like meditating: Invaluable pleasures measured as in a collective of former dreams: Mind and body experiences anew: Destinations near- -I am alone- -again.

If I was a child again, I might surround myself with Kenneth Grahame’s anthropomorphic four> The willows in the wind- -yes The Wind in the Willows: The  animated stirrings about- -Four imps of nature and aberrations: Hand in hand a fantasy becomes the possibilities of the unimaginable: The pleasures are in the companionships: Fantasies abound: 

Architectural designs colliding at Hudson Yards NYC

Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s menagerie is surprisingly normal: Snug collectively in my minds cubby hole - - Imagine Carroll and Grahame in one sentence: A hideaway where truth and reality dance: Imagine my camera atop a river of dreams and more dreams. Alice and sisters- -An  imaginary anthropomorphic clan all swaying on one boat: My camera swoons: Life as we know it pauses: Serenity prevails.

Maybe a  real reality is a better type of photograph to consider: Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim is not that either: Yet Slaughterhouse-Five sounds like a meatier fiction with hints of reality: The analogy is merely that we (Pilgrim and I) are only tethered because of our ever changing destinations: I dream some more: Like a child’s game of  hopscotch, Pilgrim and this photographer step lively: Darkness and light mingle: We run as one: Fears become captures: The soothing sound of Ryuchi Sakamoto’s Forbidden Colours plays: When alone almost anything will do:

The psychosis that is imagined became something tangible when remembered with my conversation with a brilliant mind: Kenneth Frampton, the esteemed architectural critic and historian posed for my camera: We sat in his office at Columbia University: The moment became one of my last, lasting portraits. Frampton leaned across his desk and suggested an idea: Not original by itself: But with his voice‘s subtle power- -it became like a box of toys: The gifted good fortune of feeling wrapped like a Christmas present: I was the red ribbon begging to be untied- -to explore the bounty: Frampton’s gifted idea became a tool and a mantra:  I had been running with an idea my entire career: But it never had a vocabulary or an “Oz” like voice: It was merely me fleet footed less than Usain Bolt but a life in photography still blazing across cities, countries and continents: 

Herzog and DeMeuron in New York City

My explanation of how I made photographs might be better suited in Tolkien’s “Middle Earth”:

Regrettably I never met with Frampton to show him how his ideas infused my lenses:

I accumulated miles about miles: I saw the intimately true realities: Not an ounce of glory or an ounce of the fabulist- - just a bit of music a bit of history, a fortunate camera and folklore to share.

I wake every morning to lines from Spirits’s “Nature’s Way”. I elevate my lens: I focus: I realize my camera is living in a split image filter like Gregg Toland’s Citizen Kane: Everything near and far in sharp focus.

Even with the grounded Frampton’ observations my eyes straddle worlds of another time: 

The psychosis is frightening when alone: It still does not inhibit the focus on  my cities, my architecture: My fantasies appear to endow my captures in a kind of fairy dust: Fantasies about fantasies and realities painfully about realities: My camera sees and I follow.

Renz Piano’s “The Shard” from below: London, England

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty XXVl

New York’s Chrysler among…

Truthful Fictions

I land in cities to meet head on a type of tale. It might seem that I am in an asylum: Realties abound but tales of fiction and non fiction are truly what photographing cities mean to me.

On certain days my initial steps pace like Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird- -The  appearance to the naked eye is a frenetic kite navigating in the oceans’ breeze: A status of quietude and uncertainty gathering ecstatically: Not until the music vanishes and the kite rest atop motionless grass do I realize I have completed my captures: 

The mind influenced by millions begins to toggle between tales and antics by others: To entertain something new and revisit from another time: I discover the range of voices Hunter S. Thompson, Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, Kipling, Saint-Exupéry and more informing my anxious eyes: Adventures arise seen as textured celluloid and imaginary dreams- -My large format camera releases a frame. I spy for another.

A busy day in Bangladesh

I arrive in cities with a GPS the way Dorothy might have used the Yellow Brick Road- -a necessary path to freedom of discovery and calm: I arrived on a detached Orange Blossom petal meandering independently to the fluent notes of George Bizet’s “Carmen”.  I hovered over Sevilla’s fiery fable: My camera used the visual narrative of a city besieged by an emotional romantic crucible: My camera lens equally like an eye piece monocle or a space age Hubble trailed behind the story’s protagonist as a crutch and as a map: To follow the heroine from street to street: Discover the infrastructure of a stage setting apart life: Tobacco Factory’s , Bullrings and other settings for example shadowed voices and moments from another time. My camera afire- -Carmen’s tale at hand- -I prepared like a matador- -I scoured the city with the grunt of a bull: Moment by moment the city unfolded the story breathed life: The energy powered forward.

Another capture ahead: Tales of myths and truths ahead: I changed cities: My stripes remained the same: I am equally lost and alive as my Carmen is now replaced by the real and mythical tales of “Blues” famed Buddy Boldens’ sounds. Like a gathering of pied pipers devotees: I follow him into the deepest marsh lands:  Alligators, spoonbills and herons acknowledge the trespassing  Cornet sounds: I follow at a distance  but with the pleasure of his sounds into the wild: Onward to Storyville, New Orleans.

The camera is awakened to a new pulse a new fabric of a city to be encountered and discovered.

The music of a period the history of the Creole and Cajun remembrance- The comfort of another’s voice- - my camera follows--I tag along with the Bolden sounds and  photographer E.J Bellocq’s eyes: The city is theirs: I could be an interloper: I am discovering a past life, a new world through the history, left by others: Each city I visit belongs to another yet I am experiencing discoveries that only their DNA could have shared.

Dubai Airport Interior

Alone in the wilderness is part nature part the mind: In a small way it might be where Kurosawa’s Dreams originated: The architect Kengo Kuma commissioned me to photograph a small village- -Yusuhara: Sometimes when I recall my moments there I am reminded of H.G Wells The Island of Dr. Moreau- - if only for the isolation and the forest with sounds of beasts: My imaginations sometimes seem designed by a witche’s coven: Tales and more tales dictate how I see: Tales lead me through landscapes and cityscapes: My camera’s eyes are finding with every moment a map with new discoveries:

Where would our dreams be without the Brazilian tale of the Pink Dolphin: The Japanese Shinto-Buddhist tales of Yurei and Kami: Dubai’s Bedouin jinn: I think I am on solid ground with photography’s history: It seems for ex. that photographers Carleton Watkins, O.Winston Link, Ansel Adams and even Diane Arbus might had similar imaginations in their own private wilderness.

Interior of a palace in Jaipur, India

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty XXV

Architects: Tsao & McKown: 15 William: aka William Beaver House

Truthful Fictions:

Elixirs have always floated gravity free in and above celluloid dreams. A flurry of names have danced with eternity- -and painted with light: Maybe ten-million stand - - stand and pose atop a merry-go-round inhabited by photography’s nearly three-centuries: Ten-Million names read like a reckoning and equally a musical coda: We remember the first creative glimpse: The first visual seduction: A canister of film- - a tray of dye transfer developer: I navigate ahead. Visual history’s malleable poseurs stand at attention ready to be utilized for desirous inventions: The moment’s moment.

I have waited decades to realize nothing matters more than waking to consciousness: Becoming aware of imaginary reveals: I hold in each hand deferentially one part creamsicle, one part dreamsicle: The thrill of my will the will of a thrill: A person’s life nests as a camera in Japanese, Swiss, German mechanisms- - cameras of all formats inducing delirium in every dreamer.

Detail of the Beaux-Arts Hotel 1904 the Hotel Seville: Architect Harry Allan Jacobs

More than a few Gutenbergs hold the secrets: The volumes borrow your eyes to explain the camera’s shutters- -The release that records our movements moments: If allowed the history  sounds like gambling casinos mechanical cash/money counters. One-hundred bills$ or ten-million bills$ fixed on a steroidal battery: The history of us appears: We reach to touch- -to fondle a tenderly exposed fragile frayed lace of silk- -We are vanishing.

A melting mosaic of past hearts- - baskets of treasure troves belonging to the mind’s gatekeeper- - hiding in plain sight. The counting cash machine reverberates within- -again: Images we remember images our eyes revise to remember: 

The image makers- -Cinematographers or photographers: They hold the inventions of our consciousness: Dreaming for real, one or two might stand in a door way with camera(s) in hand: Their moments are ours: They may hold an amber brightened tipped cigarette (cig) off the lips: A glass of enhancement near their lips as well: That person in their guise is you: We as in you wanted for nano seconds to be cinema’s Wim Wenders, Robby Műller, Fellini, Gianni di Venanzo John Alton, Gregg Toland, Akira Kurosawa, Takao Saitô, Masaharu Ueda, Shoji Ueda, and Asakazu Nakai.

History of cultures and continents: The history that doesn’t allow for long embracements- - so grab what you can: 

The details of many: NYC

If moving images slightly remain in our consciousness- -imagine the mind that races like a fleeing roadrunner: I try and secure the singular frames of more cities, more countries, more continents and cultures: Faster and faster my eyes awaken to the captures of Bravo, Felice Beato, Mari-Charles-Isidore-Choiselat, Marville, Fenton, Evans and centuries more- -Then repeat.

Past tenses, future tenses- - my lists are always teaming with anachronistic lists: Whatever keeps the imagination equally grounded and afloat: The endless admiration for what illuminates and informs the eyes: The  changes in fractions of seconds- -days before years, years before there is no more breaths to exhume.

Everything I try to remember at one time or another has been siphoned through my eyes like quicksilver: The exalted and the spectacular afloat and elevated: Passages of time- -reels of flights: Then I pause- -My own deja-vu remembers what has been forgotten:

buildings under construction