Architecture of Cities: Truman Capote

California Coast

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

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

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

a New York Avenue

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

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

alone in Central Park

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

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

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

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

a corner of Barcelona

The Architecture of Cities: The Primary Colors: Yellow

Barcelona

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

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

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

Flatiron Building New York City

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

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

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

somewhere in Tokyo

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

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

Presently Google Offices: Previously Hangar for The Spruce Goose

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Architecture of Cities: Past and Futures

The Architecture of Cities: Past and Futures

Brooklyn Bridge

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

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

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

Corbin Building NYC

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

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

Flatiron NYC

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

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

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

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

Bear Stearns NYC

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

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

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

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

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

Architecture of Cities: Primary Colors Something Blue: Frank Gehry

Disney Hall by Frank Gehry

Frank Gehry sat by my side: Frank looked like a cat on a hammock with a Cheshire grin: The “cat” whispered: “let’s roll”.

The two hour train from New Haven Connecticut to New York City Grand Central station was possibly an imaginative reality: There was and is always an illusory frequency of highlighted cinematic rewinds in my mind: In this moment The Trip to Bountiful : Driving Miss Daisy and Strangers on a Train  enter my guileless mind. Most photographs I make are related to a cinematic or music influence: The dreams I have in my virtual life making pictures is a dream within the reality that I might see:

277 Fifth Avenue and more

Frank Gehry’s eyes reminded me of Geraldine Page’s in “A Trip to Bountiful”: Peering out the trains window, his eyes equally soft and electric that danced within his genius mind as if he was seeing a newfound landscape: He was more than eighty years of age at that time: His youthful past met head-on his aged architectural prowess: I of course was the Rebecca De Mornay character: yes, yes different genders: a train instead of a bus (but age appropriate). Geraldine, Rebecca, Frank and me became a tailor made play for present futures and past dreams: So we shared on our Bountiful road trip a bit of who we are on the inside that those on the outside rarely see.

Frank asked me if I had made any photographs of his “works”. So of course I pulled out my favorite of the dozen or so Gehry’s I have photographed. He whispered as if looking around stealthily: “I have never seen that angle before; why is that? I told him he has probably walked by that location one-hundred times: The blue probably deceived you: It is the color of design and this case the blue that blinds most people: The building being a space gray, the heat rays from the bright twelve-o-clock sun has an oxidation that is seen but not recognized: 

NYC Avenues in reflection

I tell Gehry that I have always thought of this image as a Star Trek Black Hole  moment where the captain orders ”warp speed” and the ship disappears into darkness. “How come I don’t own that image: This is where he becomes Miss Daisy and I am the chauffeur Hoke: Well of course ( graciously)I would love for you to own it. “It is really beautiful” Frank says as we continue to look at more of my photos on my iPhone.

Making a Frank Gehry “pic” set the agenda for decades of my photography: All of my photography of architecture has had many layers of relevancy: History, footprint, place, time and more.

I realized with Gehry’s moment that the dominance of shape is enhanced by the shape of light and the shape of color: In the family of the primary colors, blue is the lowly cousin, the third child: red, yellow and some blue make up the spectrum that we see in photography: Well that is an approximation that I assume in my work: Somehow over time, blue became my steadfast omnipresent companion.

St Mary’s Cathedral in Tokyo by Kenzo Tange

My dreams suggest that I have lived among the Blue Whale sand the blue oceans they inhabit for many lifetimes:  I have dreamed about blue  sky’s not seen: My cameras have paraded among bonnets of blue bouquets: of Hyacinths, Marigolds, Periwinkle irises in tow.

Blue in all of it’s guises is the the most present color in the universe: Blue is the rarest of the colors that we know:

I live inside the bluest of Sapphires that mirrors my  wandering mind and eyes. The blue melancholy of Coltrane’s Blue Train and Mile’s Kind of Blue whisper throughout my nights: My lens reaches out to make a blue moment: a photograph that will forever be seen and unseen:

We arrived at Grand Central Station: As is customary for strangers on a train: We parted ways with two things on our minds.

Feeling Good:

“…it’s a new dawn

A new day

A new life…”

Anthony Newley/ Leslie Bricuse

The Architecture of Cities: Walking Alone in Milan

Milano: Salone del Mobile Designed by Fouksas

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

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

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

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

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

a capture

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

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

a capture

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

Just another mad, mad day on the road”.

Rolling Stones: Moonlight Mile 

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

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

a capture

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

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

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

Architecture of Cities: Primary Colors: Red

Virgin Hotel: New York City

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

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

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

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

Marble Collegiate Church: New York City

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

Grand Central Station

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

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

London School of Economics and Political Science

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

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

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

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

Rudyard Kipling

Architecture of Cities: Places to Pray

Human’s Tomb Delhi, India

Common prayer 

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

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

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

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

The Blue Mosque Istanbul, Turkey

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

Samarkand, Uzbekistan

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

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

Jewish Synagogue Florence Italy

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

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

Nina Simone

Architecture of Cities: In Transit

NYC to DC

Transit through time is how I remember my past until I reach the future.

My photography of architecture often engages transportation: Wading through undulating waves, experiencing time travel. From the waves’ crest to the trough, I have sometimes seen unparalleled landscapes and urban landscapes. Crafts of known and unknown transport have transformed my experiences as a photographer.

It is as if everything important is seen in the vastness that is Antonioni’s The Passenger. 

Ironic imaginary soundtracks from Judy Collins’ Leaving on a Jet Plane and the Byrds’ Eight Miles High pervade the skies like auditory hallucinations are what I could expect to hear: There are no songs, no sounds just mere privacy: time is precious: it races onward.

NYC Uptown to Downtown

I have been saucering my entire life. As a child I imagined I was an adult: As an adult my heart is betrothed to my childhood: My eyes and heart are tethered to my past, present and future.

My mind meanders along a circuitry of dreams: Undulating waves rise and fall before me: Rod Serling’s A Kind Of Stopwatch doesn’t exist yet: I am transported across continents in planes, trains and more. I have seen the skies and mountains tangle from Zurich to Haldenstein: Moscow to Samarkand: Aspen to Albuquerque: St Moritz to Nice, Los Angeles to Vancouver: Nonstop journeys.

The places in a way don’t matter: I can dream about travel and record something in my mind that will have that indelible moment printed somewhere on my brain.

But what about the chickens, cows, pigs, Major-Generals, lieutenant colonels who have bunked alongside me: The experiences from the smell of funk across plane cabins, train cars and a cog in engine buses that have transported my mind transported my camera : travel is a love too great to ignore.

Somewhere in the Netherlands

Photography dresses up my life: I prance along the edges: My camera accompanies every prance and all dance.

My favorite pictures in my camera come from saucering: Transported while the rhythm of transit undulates atop the earth and below the underground: Into the horizons and atop the crests and troughs of the built world.

The fabulous perspectives make my eyes come alive: the capturing spirit has seen cities seemingly fly by: unidentified structures I can’t get close to seem magical: I dream of these of dreams.

Would I jump from the transport to achieve a better “snap”. Would I get my boots stuck in three feet of mud for a better explanation of what I am looking at: would it make sense to self examine how I see while I examine how to snippety-snap-snap? Possibly.

From the Bus in Yusuhara Japan

The Thrill is Gone doesn’t exist in my camera: riding over the Swiss alps, through the Honduran jungles and teeter-tottering over Big Sur is about neural pulses: “electrified”.

I have imagined to make photographs feel like Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s “magical realism”.  It is a reckoning: that I have not yet cultivated: It is merely what arrives in my mind as I stand alone in cities of thirty million, or deserts with not an echo in sight.

Making photographs of the constructed environment the constructed footprint is an adventure: 

Everyone has their “whale”. Mine starts with my imagining a sighting of a dorsal fin: From there everything and anything is possible: I try to make photographs that are the beginning of the story.

The Architecture of Cities: Entire Cities

The Pope visited New York City 1979 on Fifth Avenue

Aristotle seemingly whispered: “lift your eyes:

The past is behind you the present is almost the past the future is near:

Lift your eyes and show me what you see”:

Looking up is the end of the moment, but how you get there is what the photograph may be about:

Not a single picture begins until you lift your eyes: then you elevate your gaze:

Sometimes my eyes consume entire streets, boulevards and avenues: The history is self evident: the process takes moments I have not been able to count yet. But I might estimate hundreds of thousands of snaps make for a career’s mosaic. 

Imagine my ears like a caffeine infused amused lynx’s twirling to the fabled told tales by Mark Twain: Imagine my world following the closing pages of Will Durant’s “Civilization”:

From the moment I arrived in New York, my camera has seen thousands of days of daylight and evenings.

The Empire State Building on Fifth Avenue

The New York I know has throngs of people passing by every street corner: Taxis, buses and subways maintain a tremble throughout the day.

Richard Strauss’s  Sprach Zarathustra fills the air: Stanley Kubrick, the fledgling photographer genius filmmaker quietly addressing the photographer’s speak: Lift your eyes:

The camera pans Fifth Avenue: The Guggenheim is a distance: Tiffany’s is near: Bonwit Teller was razed: St Patricks’ Cathedral is a few arms stretched: Atlas, sculptural reliefs and Rockefeller Center hover: What else is amiss?

I never saw the Pope:

The land spreads beyond wide angle proportions like the desert crossing in John Ford’s The Searchers: The eyes have it: It is amazing when the unexpected becomes the purpose: The sounds that turn the head: The required gait like a jacanas toeing atop the lily’s: The fixed lens seeing when to snippety-snap-snap.

Everyday in some fashion I continue the cinematic gaze, the pan east, south and like an owls whirling neck back to the west and around.

I have with excruciating pleasure begun to realize the captures that are necessary: They are moments in time that I may never see again. 

I have kept an old fashioned card catalog of dreams: Those dreams on occasion become reality: At some point those dreams will have an expiration date: My archives are alive in both my dreams and in my reality:

Fifth Avenue detail

It was never a process: It was about steps:

I was making a book about architecture: I had a list of buildings I was to include: The list was pieced together by the publisher and advisors: I had to choreograph my days not just in New York City: I managed to travel to dozens of cities: Each city had an invisible clock: Fifth Avenue in New York subconsciously was my visual template for seeing not so simply a building but the light and spirit of a city: When I arrived in the mornings, or the evenings I couldn’t merely approach my destination and shoot: I had to capture entire cities in one hour: I had to understand the rigor that each city had to offer: The directions the stars pointed?

Every city is never the same as the previous: But all cities beckon: Copenhagen, Berlin, Stuttgart, Barcelona, Tokyo, Moscow, Paris, Rotterdam and more: 2001: A Space Odyssey’s“Strauss” continues to could be heard across continents:: Aristotle whispers: The clock ticks:

I often stare across cityscapes and landscapes when my agendas are completed: My mind rhapsodizes about my captures: It is like a drug induced psychosis: I am remembering the most recent photographs: The photographs from decades: the train windows reflecting images: the locomotives’ interior spaces: The “…scapes” that I pass by: One image in my mind frames a lifetime: a million miles of traveling for photography: Millions of miles for more.

Architect #FumihikoMaki WTC 4 in New York :: No longer in view from this Fifth Avenue angle

The Architecture of Cities: The Beauty of Looking Up

42nd street New York

The Beauty of looking up:

The earliest examples of some portrait photography were about the essence of gazing into the twilight lives of others:

The most significant recipients of a photographer’s exposure were  beautifully executed studies of a subjects gaze: The freeze, the subjects had to undertake early on was part art, part scientific experiment: if the image moved it would be blurred: so there was this study in an unintentional way of the life in its twilight years:

I understand a bit of portrait photography because I at one time had made thousands:

I always liked the notion of the subjects “gaze”. I do remember fondly Irving Penn’s portrait of Joan Didion: This exuberant silver toned image: beautiful does not appropriately apply: the framed study was beyond: I remember the silver tone, but I also remember the gaze.

Today two hundred years later, the portrait gaze is still significant.

57th street: The Solow Building New York City

Architectural photography is about a different beast: The captured image is about the photographer’s gaze: To examine a moment in time that will be lost forever if not for a reflexive snippety-snap-snap. When the photographer sees the assumed edifice of his intentions he might acknowledge it as an otherkin or mere brick and mortar: he considers the needs necessary to shoot, the needs to be snapped: If the photographer turns his head for a fleas second and returns to make a capture: what was felt in the initial capture may be gone forever: The photographer may say till death: “the one that got away”.

There is rarely chaos in architectural photography: Sometimes there may be a note of pell-mell: an infusion of creative passion: We must all adopt techniques that the science and tools will allow: the tricks are numerous: The art and execution desirable: Where to go next: How to see next: But what is architecture without the photographer’s gaze:

The measured photographer embraces a photograph like a lab technician waiting for atoms to disperse under the microscope: He sizes up the landscape: He acknowledges the footprint: The gaze absorbs ideas: a particular moment is elevated: Imagine sleeping naked with a snow leopard.

Photography’s marriage of archaeology or anthropology might seem a bit convoluted: The photographer may merely espy the reflective qualities and considerations: but there is more:

Every urban or rural development stands in a history’s moment: the history of yesterday will reveal something about this now, but what will it feed us about tomorrow.

the light on east 29th street NYC

We are swinging in a continuum of change: the question for this photographer is: how do I reveal it: Digging a massive hole under the Empire State Building? Excavating documents from a decade or a century past: Impossible: The gaze is not a peek: The gaze is about why I am seeing:

I look at architecture: l consider the possibilities:

One day my parachute fluttered above my head: It seemed like a mess/flock of birds

spirited away in slow motion: At first I tired of the look up: Then I caught the sound of wings below: I laughed with laughter: Two black birds sweating like athletes in training hovered an arm or two away: I looked down and across the sky as if I was one or more of the perspiring crows or sparrows: I nodded with a bit of ho-hum:

I realized that the infinite that lives inside my lens while looking up reveals something  more: Maybe this is where astronomy lives in my mind: somewhere up: Maybe it is through astronomy where I learned  how architecture could be captured: Looking up is about more than architecture it is quietly about our universe above: Possibly my lens possesses a communing of the stars and dreams in one frame.

Maybe in some eyes I sound like William Wharton’s Birdy: Something compels me to fly while merely addressing the values of seeing through my lens: to put your mind at ease there is nothing psychotic, just a dream in my reality. 

All of the materials, all of the surfaces  on this globe and beyond are my canvases: My eyes stand before me: Everything looks so inviting: What might I do: For the moment, I will take a picture of what I imagine is there: From there I will see what else may be captured:

“And miles to go before I sleep,

 And miles to go before I sleep.” (Robert Frost)

The Sherry Netherland Hotel meets Apple Store on fifth Ave

Sent from my iPad

The Architecture of Cities: New Cathedrals Part Three

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

Nary an eye can see it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Detail from the Galerie Borghese: Rome

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

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

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

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

Musee Nicephore -Niepce

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

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

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

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

Museum of Modern Art: a Caler over the steps

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

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

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

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

Architecture of Cities: New Cathedrals Part 2

Jean Nouvel: Arab World Institute

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

My hurried education: 

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

Cultural wars were beginning to say hello.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daniel Libeskind: Denver Art Museum

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

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

Richard Meier Getty Museum

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

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

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

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

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

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

Architecture of Cities: New Cathedrals

Palace of Legion of Honor: San Francisco

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

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

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

Dallas/Fort Worth Museum of Art; Architect Tadao Ando

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whitnew Museum of Art

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

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

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

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

The Broad: By Diller and Scofidio

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

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

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

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

The Architecture of Cities: The Midwest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Graves Hanselmann House: Fort Wayne, Indiana

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Architecture of Cities: The Viennese Waltz

gasometer by Wolf Prix: Vienna

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

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

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

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

Haas-Haus by Hans Hollein Vienna

Oh Vienna:

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

Gasometer by Wolf Prix Vienna

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

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

Haas-Haus by Hans Hollein Vienna

The Architecture of Cities: The World

Niteroi Contemporary Museum by Oscar Niemeyer

Oscar Niemeyer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outside the Niemeyer Copacabana Home

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

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

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

Oscar Niemeyer Casa das Canoas

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

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

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

So I begin, so I begin to capture:

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

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

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

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

Niteroi Contemporary Museum by Oscar Niemeyer

The Architecture of Cities: The World

#Architect Thomas Phifer #NorthCarolina Museum of Art

Between two buildings with one hour to shoot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Architect: #Snohetta James Hunt Library Raleigh North Carolina

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

Snohetta’s James Hunt Library

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

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

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

Snohetta

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Architecture of Cities: The World Chasing the Light

Entering London

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Entering Tokyo

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

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

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

Entering Dubai

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

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

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

The Capture: London’s #HeronTower #KohnPedersenFox

The Architecture of Cities: The World

Cartier’s Panther: New York City

Chasing the Light: Chasing History

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

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

Met Life Clock Tower: New York City

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

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

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

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

Architect Toyo Ito:: Hotel Santos Porta Fira in Barcelona

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The United Nations: New York City

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

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

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

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

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

The Architecture of Cities: The World

#FranklloydWright Beth Sholom Congregation Elkins Park Pennsylvania

Dreams of Architecture’s Silence: “Shhh”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Orthodox Church of Kyiv, Ukraine

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

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

Antoni Gaudi. La Sagrada Familia. Barcelona, Spain

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

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

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

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

Kengo Kuma. Yusuhara, Japan