The Architecture of Cities: The World

December 07, 2023

The Architecture of Cities: The World

The old vs. the new:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The only thing between my life and death was hope.

My knees held tight to the cement:

My quads cushioned my mind:

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

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

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

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

If I fell?

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

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

I pushed.

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

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

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

But then,; What an “effing” view.

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

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

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

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

The Architecture of Cities: The World

November 30, 2023

The Architecture of Cities: The World

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

THE PERCH

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

I sat alone on a Travertine limestone bench.

I did have one companion: the silence of myself.

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

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

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

Chowdhury’s Gulshan Society Mosque: Dhaka Bangladesh

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Architecture of Cities: The World

November 23, 2023

The Architecture of Cities: The World

Shenzhen Airport detail : Architect Fuksas

Truth in fiction:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have made it: I snap

The Architecture of Cities: The World

November 16, 2023

The Architecture of Cities: The World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rem Koolhaas; New Court London Headquarters for Rothschild Bank

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

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

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

The Architecture of Cities: The World

November 09, 2023

#Petersenautomobilemuseum Los Angeles designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox

The Architecture of Cities: The World

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

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

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

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

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

I know there is no Nureyev in me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#IsayWeinfeld meets #ZahaHadid on New York City

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

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

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

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

Detail of #RemKoolhaas’Wilshire Boulevard Temple with Shoei Shigematsu

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

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

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

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

The Architecture of Cities: The World

November 02, 2023

The Architecture of Cities: The World Mona Lisa

Seagrams Building by Mies Van Der Rohe and Philip Johnsom

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

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

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

Renzo Piano Building: California Academy of Sciences

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

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

Architects conjure like a witches brew:

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

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

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

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

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

Kengo Kuma Architect: Aix en Provence Conservatory of Music

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

The Architecture of Cities: The World

October 26, 2023

Subway Station in Sao Paulo Brazil by Paulo Mendes da Rocha

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After the Rain

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

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

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

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

Sir Norman Foster: City Hall, London England

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

Dominique Perrault: Aplix Factory in Nantes France

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

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

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

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

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

Grimshaw Architects: Frost Museum of Science: Miami Florida

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

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

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

The Architecture of cities: The World

October 19, 2023

The Architecture of cities: The World

The immediacy of now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Architecture of Cities: The World

October 12, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kengo Kuma Asakusa Culture Tourist Information Center

The Architecture of Cities: The World

October 05, 2023

The Architecture of Cities: The World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am always reveling in the moment:

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

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

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

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

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

The Architecture of Cities: The World

September 28, 2023

The Architecture of Cities: The World

I remember sitting astride my motorcycle. I raced along blvd’s as if I was Steve McQueen in “The Great Escape”. My passions rise. Cinema delivers a boyhood joy of adventure.

One day while re-enacting McQueen’s exploits I landed in the hospital. Collateral damage can be an experience to celebrate. At some point you must realize that nature has a requiem for you.

I am not Cicero, merely passionate for the moment.

The triumvirate: We three became me.

The Spider Monkey can seem anxious, almost rabid. Their eyes constantly dart across Brazil’s tropical forests eyeing food and prey. The Golden Langur Monkey eyes a secret life of serenity along the Bhutan tree tops.

When I was very young, possibly as recent as yesterday, I dreamed that my camera’s eyes should embrace the monkeys’ behaviors. I was one, now I am three.

Preposterous? I realized it has already happened: My mind runs, rants and raves through the world’s streets. Yet my body hides in plain sight: I stand quietly in secret: My mind in a trance infused by an imagined mass of anabolic steroids. My mind flexes: My body flexes: I snare a few frames of architecture. My camera exposes the greats of past, present and future designs: Gehry’s, Hadid’s, Niemeyer’s Nouvel’s, Kuma’s. My images present their best sides, their best impressions of greatness. “We three” made some spectacular moments in photography.

It isn’t the geography that impresses an audience. It is always the images we share. The geography is merely about catching a plane, train or automobile: But the images elicit what dreams are made from:

One dream for instance, was to follow the Silk Routes conquered by Genghis Khan: When I landed In Hong Kong and Shenzhen my eyes filled with fairy dust: my fantasies’ realities were near.

My dreams to travel and make photographs were becoming my reality. In my quest to shoot and/or discover architecture and the light it wears, I travel. I travel from New York to New Orleans. I travel from Copenhagen to Amsterdam. I travel from Vienna to Paris. I travel from Tokyo to Kyoto.

I have stood in front of many buildings with only one objective: to make the reality seem unique.

Raleigh North Carolina Museum by ThomaPhiefer

But everyday in every city must have a unique identity: Iight has been my friend and adversary. My entire career has been challenged by the light made, the light nature gave me.

I am game to confront the A. S. M. (art, science and math) of photography each time. Whether the clock strikes 3:00 pm or twilights’ 5:00 pm I am there. Each landing on a new continent or in a new city presents my conflict with light hued balances.

My mind pauses: I conjure up a witches brew, a discourse within my photography. I exhume a few past visual dreams. I begin my interview with myself: photography 101 course: Where to begin.

You would think that after so many decades of making pictures: it would be a “snippety snap-snap”.

The world has a funny way of telling you what to do: It is almost like you have an obligation to the medium to make something more: This is Rio: This is Santa Fe: This is Delhi: This is Yusuhara: This is earth: This is my light: This is my photography

Without my motivations the pictures would land lusterless.

My interior metronome has a new pulse. My monkey’s in tow.

We begin again.

#RAFAELVINOLY #THEFENCHURCH #THEWALKIETALKIE

The Architecture of Cities: New York V

September 21, 2023

The Architecture of Cities: New York V

It is about aged beauty and the ghosts that stood where I stand.

There will always be a beginning: But my question has always been: What was before the beginning.

From the first day I realized I was not becoming, but had become a photographer, I imagined I was the Bowman/Star Child journeying through all of the known galaxies: I was not sure what I was looking for: But I knew I could not stop until I saw what I needed to see.

Maybe I was searching for my first Dominican Blue Amber. Maybe inside that particular amber a glossed in resin Praying Mantis resided: Imagine a mantis who might have resembled me: That frozen expression I wore when the camera discovered and I declared “That’s it”: snippety snap-snap!

My camera’s first diary began when I landed in New York City.

My camera has seen hundreds of cities. All cities are like a million tesserae mosaic on canvas. I see all the pieces of a building that I need to capture but where do I start from? How does one narrate the puzzle of a photograph that has not yet been made?

My work became symbiosis with my pleasures: Yes of course the reverse makes sense as well: The pleasures of the working eyes.

I stood at the southeast corner of 51st street and Lexington Avenue. The Morris Lapidus designed Summit Hotel was summoning my eyes. How could I make any other photographs in that moment?

Morris Lapiduc Architect; Hotel on 51st and Lexington

I am a sand-sifter. I could never merely say, “shoot”. For God’s sake I am the “Star Child” I have seen the entirety of the known galaxies. How could I merely make a snap. A sand-sifter is looking for a discovery: But not a soul knows what that is until…

I stood breathless: Not because of this moment alone: But my mind’s eyes had vaulted from New York to Miami. I was no longer merely making one photograph in front of the Summit: But my mind was dreaming of a second image: standing aside James Bond on the diving board stood framed over Morris Lapidus’s Hotel Fountainbleu’s cool pool blue. I was looking beyond just Morris Lapidus, but the architect’s body of architecture: My body had not budged: Was I alone in the streets of New York City, or was I breathing the warm Atlantic in a scene from Goldfinger. My eyes felt dilated as if on steroids. The mind’s eyes work that way with my heart.

Many years ago I brought my portfolio to the Hearst Corporation: It was something photographer’s religiously did in a long ago millennium.

I cannot remember anything about the people I met or was supposed to meet. I just remember that the patterns of design from interior ceiling to the lobby were of an elegance I had not met before.

Many years after that afternoon, I had the opportunity to shoot the portrait of the new Hearst Tower architect Sir Norman Foster. For some reason I think he remembers me fondly. I remember two dueling knights. In my perspective, it is such a brilliant marriage for the photographer: to have the knowledge of the architect and his words about his designs as you enter an organic library of information directing your eyes to what may become!

My camera is in love, I dance. My moves are a bit frightening to see.

I have been photographing the relationship between architecture’s old and new for decades.

Visiting Foster’s Hearst Tower, is like seeing an old friend: so much to see and catch up on. My eyes revisit the many possibilities. My personal narrative: Light, shape, history, footprint, and the discipline that is photography take over. I look up. I look around. I sneak a glimpse at the light in the sky. My mind does the jig: But I waltz across the avenue. My mind’s sundial calculates the time to click. I sand-sift. “There it is” I holler between my ears.

Foster’s Hearst is one of a few buildings that I remind my eyes to “sneak another peek”. I could possibly explain my reasoning in ten thousand words: It is about aged beauty and the ghosts that stood where I stand.

Neil Young whispers, “Old Man, look at my life”. I run, I dance, I wait. I wait to place another piece of the city’s tesserae mosaics in place. The mind’s honesty may sometimes be exhilarating. I dance some more.

I wonder what the lit up minds of Ken Kesey, Aldous Huxley and Owsley Stanley would make of how my mind’s eyes see the architecture of cities?

Kengo Kuma wrote to me that he “believes that to build architecture is to design light”.

Light designs my pictures.

The Architecture of Cities: New York Part 1V

September 14, 2023

The Architecture of Cities: New York Part 1V

If you would not mind toe stepping into peaceful urban madness. We might listen to one thousand songs: Or we might merely hear Led Zeppelin’s “Going to California”: Rolling Stones’s “Street Fighting Man”. But just maybe “Also Sprach Zarathustra ” sets the tone to follow me as I lift a lens to New York on this fine day.

We march along like kindred spirits: We wait to witness the manifestation of things that need our eyes. How many times have you witnessed a crimson alligator mating with a yellow swallow?

I tend to what my camera might see. I wait. I might as well be a botanist tending to ten newly bred orchids. Years pass.

I tend to what my camera might see. I wait. I might as well be an archaeologist tending to the preservation of a newly discovered artifact. Time will tell.

I tend to what my camera might see. I wait. I might as well be a psychiatrist tending to the mental ailments of a pining patient. Something will be revealed.

I tend to what my camera might see. I wait. I might as well be an astrophysicist tending to the nature of the universe. Stars talk.

How we will interpret what we see and the laws of the universe, all serve the same purpose: To understand what appears before us: to discovery and the knowledge that leads us forward.

The tools of some scientists may seem different than a photographer’s: but the purpose they serve are the same as my camera: The camera and lens are my tools that I carry daily. There is always an opportunity to excavate a city’s history that hides in plain sight.

I stare through my viewfinder. The time lapses from daylight to the twilight before the night. What have I captured? I might have been in India: I might have been in China: But where I have been or where I am in the moment, nothing changes: I wait.

Being a photographer: Capturing a photograph: Living with dreams: Reminds me that everyday I stand with my camera, I need to be like my owl: The flight of an owl seems silent to man’s ears: I stand in that same silence: My eyes too pose silently in anticipation of an image that might appear.

An owl can twist its head around some 270 degrees. It is less than my mind twists: but like the owl my mind quivers as the prey appears…we capture.

This architectural photographer approaches each and every commission or daily appraisal of architecture as if I am excavating the properties of the said building. There is a reveal. The camera lives to record the best moments: The best of architectural photography is when an audience of one or one million becomes a witness to that reveal. It is the light the eye sees in the highland valleys or the urban streets that matter.

Every picture shares a story: Family: Nature: Portraits: Interiors: Landscapes: All of the photographers I have admired have had one thing in common: A story exists to tell. Certain egos might deny their influences: But Roger Fenton, Eugene Atget, Herbert List, Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Angel Adams and more: At one time or another they hollered as I do:”That’s it”. That’s it is an endearing self awareness. All seasoned photographers know when they have been successful and why. They know their efforts: They utilized tools and heart to achieve.

You see, all of the above are scientists. They used everything they knew about the science, math and their heart to execute as well as possible. Those photographers were like Livingstone, Leakey, Burton and more. Everyone was searching for something to behold, the “aha”; just different methods.

If you can hear the silence a photographer sees, maybe the answers or discoveries are linked to Gerard de Nerval’s pet lobster: The silence and the secrets are found only in the deep. Nerval’s secrets were in the oceans’ deep: Mine are clearly in my mind.

Everyone with a camera or phone has something to share: The light, the moment or the experience.

I can talk endlessly about all of the cities I love shooting in: Tokyo, Paris, Mexico, London, Barcelona and one hundred more.

But for today, and the past few weeks I revel in the joy of stepping into my New York streets. For decades I have photographed the city as if I am saying “what’s new”.

Sometimes I hate to admit that I have these passions. But to have lived my life and still almost quiver when I see what matters to me: To come to terms with the manner in which I espied the discovery; Is an amazing part of this photographer’s life.

I leave you with one more idiosyncratic consideration: I can still hear the music all the way from my heart to my eyes: Cold Play’s “Clocks”??

When it matters most, make more
#KPF #Kohnpedersenandfox

The Architecture of Cities: New York Part 111

September 07, 2023

The Architecture of Cities: New York Part 111

Bookends: Benet’s to Benjamin and More

“Charlemagne”. Turn the page back. “Charlie Chaplin”. Turn the pages forward. “Chaucer”. Skip a few pages. “Darwin”. Close your eyes and grab a page. “Abraham Lincoln”.

I received Benet’s “The Reader’s Encyclopedia when I was maybe eleven or twelve years old.

I stare back into those twelve impressionable years. It was the moment when I realized that there was more! The gift that continues to give.

The world talks about the information highway. But my reality was a moment when a child stood alone in the middle of the universe and realized something new had entered the body.

The above mentioned book was that first intellectual reckoning.

#apple and the #SherryNetherlands on fifth avenue

Tracing my photograph’s history helps me realize how slow slow can be. I do remember the next moment where the motivational “more” appeared: I saw Jerry Uelsmann’s surreal“Philosopher’s Desk”. I was a fraction older: A day or two more mature: I realized more could became a possibility.

I have spent my entire photography life looking for the definition of more.

A miracle of nature appeared one day: I saw a picture: The jeweled ice of the Japanese Hokkaido Tokachi River: The river’s frozen mouth becomes blocks of ice opposing the sand and the ocean. The idea of natures visual power stirred the urgency of this photographer to make more.

To make the photographs I needed, I must have one foot on the ground and the other in a real phantasm. This is my path towards more.

I have read Don McLean wrote “American Pie” as an anthem to the end of a time. Periods come and go, but living for something new, something ahead in time can be such an amazing experience. I have dreamed that the end never comes: Reading Benet’s meant for me: our present and future will inevitably become the end. But in the meantime, seek the thrills that make it all worthwhile.

The day I read Walter Benjamin’s “Arcades Project” became a career jarring altered state:

If there was a reckoning of what to live for, it was my departure into the future via New York’s architectural history.

The “Arcades” made it possible for me to see not the present, but the three reasons to make photographs: to expose the past to the present and to share the present with the future. There are a number of cities to make this happen: but living for decades in New York all seemed so natural to make this city my canvas to see more.

The “Arcades” enlightened me: I look through architectures’ four squares of glass: life behind windows has so many layers of stories, that a single frame from me can be my homage to both Benet and Benjamin.

I always wanted to be like Benjamin’s flaneur in New York. But as a photographer I am not so sure a flaneur can see more than my camera seeking more from the trillion architectural experiences.

My photography goal is to replicate the experience that the idea of the Arcades presents in every frame until there is no more me: my photography phantasm ceases to be. So much history, so much culture, so much living for history ahead.

The engaging journalist Linda Ellerbee would sign off: “And So It Goes”.

The Architecture of Cities:New York: Part 2

August 31, 2023

The Architecture of Cities:New York: Part 2

If there is darkness then there must be light

The light into darkness, the darkness into light is the nature of my photography.

The camera lens at first glance is my personal window into the cities’ corridors: architectural’s past, present and future. This is where I see light mingling with darkness. This is where the reveal stops the heart. This is where photography begins.

THE DARKNESS:

Mary Shelley wrote the Frankenstein story in the darkness of candlelight. The World War 2 Dresden bombing in darkness blinded the pilots from seeing the horror. Thomas De Quincey’s “Confessions of an Opium Eater” was a frenzied darkness revealed. “Silence of the Lambs” was a soulless darkness discovered. Alice falling down the rabbit hole in darkness was a world revealed. Jack the Ripper allowed for darkness to follow the victims screams. “The Naked City” is where the mysteries of the dark live.

I have found that while walking alone in New York City’s darkness my imagination prevails over my reality: I walk among the shadowed chiaroscuro buildings and city life. My mind prompts a narrative. Every frame become a reality. A frame is a fictional account of non-fiction. I live in a cinematic dream; a cinematic nightmare. I listen to my camera’s “snippety, snap-snap”. A photograph that matters is made.

The Light:

The light is simple: Dancing naked atop two blue whales while crossing the seven seas: Skydiving from afar with New York City in sight: caressing the neck of a twenty-three foot reticulated python with my finger tips: these thrills give my electrolytes meaning.

I never ran to be in position. I saw a photograph that needed to be seen and I walked: It is a pace that made sense to get somewhere without drawing attention. In the moment I have never wanted anyone to see what I see. What I saw in my mind’s eye, always needed to be revisited one thousand more times: Imagine Alec Guinness’s character in The Bridge on the River Kwai: Alec was retrieved from his sun baked solitary confinement. His eyes raised to the sun: He blinked one thousand times in a nano second: His eyes began to see clearly: I too blink one thousand times in a nano second: My eyes begin to see clearly: it is the only way I am sure of what I have seen.

My four plus decades photographing in New York City has given me an opportunity to witness the undiscovered: It is one of the greatest games that I play with my camera’s eyes: To walk a mile further: To see a bit more than what I am supposed to see.

Sometimes in a plethora of memorable reveries, I hear the Celtic Sanctuary from the movie Braveheart; The two nearly star-crossed lovers began their tryst in the darkness of the night and continue into the daylight of the dawn. My photographs begin in the darkness of my mind, and come to life in the light of the day.

For every photograph I make there is a mingling of dreams from when I sleep and when I dance.

Corridors are passageways and windows into world’s that few recognize: If you allow the camera to see.

The Architecture of Cities: New York: Part One

August 24, 2023

The Architecture of Cities: New York: Part One

When I was young and younger I remember the hills rolled before my eyes. The cemeteries were framed staid. They memorably crowned the mortals and immortalized.

Maybe it is like being lured out of darkness into the light. You instinctively know that you must pass the dead before you live. My legions of dreams followed me into New York. I drew my breath and challenged my future.

The bus kept movin’, movin’ and rollin’. I was following my nightmares and fantasies. I was not yet a photographer but I was.

I arrived at my New York four corners.

Some people use the the North Star to navigate with. I pulled my dividing compass. I traced my life from the Long Island Expressway graveyards to where I stand in this moment. My fears in that present and later my memories in this present allowed me to reflect that start to almost this finish.

I would like to say my New York started with Fritz Lang’s Blade Runner: Circa 1929. Those cinematic images and a few others have showered me with fantastic imagery. Just about every photograph I thought about thereafter was cinematically influenced.

Woody Allen’s Manhattan: Circa 1979 might be closer to who I became.. The opening credits wished my camera into dream sequences: sort of like visual sorcery opening the doors to the greater possibilities.

I have examined tons of great photographs. So few influenced me. My impressions in my moments propelled me. My own personal cinema drove me. When my mind’s body took off down and across the five New York borough streets and boulevards: I started to find my me.

Then there was the first! Everyone says they remember “their first”. Most remember the revisionism as if in a graphic illustrated version.

The first photograph I made in New York was actually one of thousands. I realized that while I watched movies I was always lost in a dream apart from the film. That is why the larger stories mattered so much: I decided that there was a “still” from almost every movie: Imagine one thousand films: Imagine one thousand dreams of “first” photographs.

So here I stand.

The three “Blade Runner” renditions travel with me as do memories from thousands of other movies. I make a million mental snaps daily. Each visual is a window into my process. It is the process that matters.

Every exposure in your life is connected to your own personal process. Mine as I mentioned is a visual sorcery that elevates my moment. That immersive levitation is what challenges this photographer.

The first time Pope Paul visited New York I realized my photography had the ability to elevate my moment, my camera’s eyes.

Many years later while witnessing the fall of our New York empire circa 2001, I realized a tethered sensibility to the Pope’s visit. Nothing about the above is connected to a religious force. It is merely optical enhancement through a realization that passion matters most.

My architectural photographs in New York and cities of the world are my passion’s reveal. When I die, I will die as a child with my eyes wide open.

“Stay tuned”.

The Architecture of Cities: Tokyo

August 17, 2023

The Architecture of Cities: Tokyo

One twilight evening in Tokyo was particularly enlightening.

I was racing against time to see what I might see before the twilight faded into darkness.

I raced against time. My mind kept rewinding the significance of getting where I needed to be. The city was soon to tear town Kurokawa’s “Nakagin Capsule Tower”. Without any references, I knew where I needed to be standing at the best twilight moment.

I remember a similar story about Kenzo Tange’s “Yoyogi National Gymnasium”.

It is not that another photographer might make the photograph needed to be made. It was that my mind’s camera needed to make the capture. My light was nearing a solemn goodnight. My whole career came pouring forward in flashing imagery like Hieronymus Bosch and Joan Miro delightfully dancing before me.

The passion to capture the light in the moment is a disease. It is an addiction I lovingly embrace. It allows me to breathe.

With one deep Sleep Apnea mannered inhale I raced across roads. My camera bag swung naked to the public. I was not crying. I was tearing with anticipation.

I do not speak Japanese. But I understood the “Capsule” was to soon be razed. I could always find a book or a video. But what is mine in my eyes is mine for eternity.

For maybe fifteen minutes of racing like a “Gorilla in the MIst”, I panicked. Everything soulful, and heartfelt imagery of forty years of photography danced and danced before my eyes. Every image I had ever made sat alongside my tear drops warning me to meet the challenge. ‘Sorry to share this information with you, but it is just how I operate’.

This single picture for better or worse I needed to capture. I needed to be “there”. It felt like a link to my present; A link to my past: a link to everything in my future.

Architecture in Tokyo is not like most cities. The country of Japan enforces their earthquake legislation. If the codes are not met. A building may be brought down. Because a building is iconic, and still does not meet the legislative codes it too will disappear.

I am a photographer of architecture. Every second gazing through my viewfinder is a moment in history: I see not merely history: I see the Samurai, the Emperor, the Yakuza, Akira Kurosawa, Eikoh Hosea, Yukio Mishima and more. I see more than I know as my pace quickens.

Racing along the streets to capture my “Capsule” was not a fantasy, it was a dream come true.

The dream come true is the only reality that lives. I need to make a “snippety snap-snap” or if not, I have failed.

I have missed opportunities for decades. Though I have learned over time that that in itself is part of my inspiration. I trace the moments and places where I have stood. I trace my life back by millenniums. I feel the wind of not merely history but a culture that stands before me,”waiting” for my snap!

The architects Kengo Kuma, Tadao Ando, Toyo Ito, Sanaa, Maki, Isozaki, Tange, and many more have been present in my time spent in Japan. They might not know how their works and presence have influenced my eyes. But how could I arrive in Tokyo and all of Japan without acknowledging their voices in my every frame photographed.

Artists Who Have Died: The Lyrical Brice Marden

August 16, 2023

Artists Who Have Died: The Lyrical Brice Marden

Brice Marden was a grand name in the corridors of the art world. He was an integral swath of fabric connecting the late 20th to early 21st century art world.

He was the in-betweener.

All of the giants before him: Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Cy Twombly, Josef Albers were diamond studded facets that became an amalgamated Brice.

He was like the weight of the anchor for a giant tanker! He challenged the burden: He was the link to generations of giants. He was a force of nature and one of the many to bring forth the past. He was one of the few to forge into the future. These are my eyes talking.

After photographing hundreds of artists’ portraits in their studios you begin to witness the DNA tethered between generations. It is not an exact science, but certainly the heart gets an opinion. In a way it may be the grandest compliment that can be made: Brice Marden was the embodiment of the painters’ gesture. He was the “aha” moment. His work also suggested, “forward we march”.

Art isn’t taught it is learned. I was told that by the artist Robert Motherwell. When he was tasked daily with imitating a particular Cézanne he knew he needed a new way of thinking. He took all of the strategies of a long gone genius and launched himself into his new direction. That is how I think of Brice Marden. I always store these important emotions in my temporal lobe.

I remember walking into what was both a capacious and intimate studio. Brice shook my hands. I could feel the ice in his veins. Not that he was an old cold dude, on the contrary, he pulsed, and lava flowed through his eyes. He was fearless. The camera saw even more.

I don’t believe there is a person, biographer, lover, nor a soul who can fully describe what the artist is/was thinking as he/she stands soulfully in front of the blank canvas. I remember asking deKooning, Jasper, Rauschenberg, Haring and Basquiat what they thought standing naked in front of a naked canvas. To a person I feel they giggled addressing my naïveté. But not Marden. It was almost as if he wanted me to follow him through his past: through his wars. We walked the spacious studio. He asked me a ton of questions about the aforementioned artists. Everyone I photographed also wanted to know about the artists descending in the past and those scaling towards a future. I really think Brice tried to answer the blank canvas question without feeling he had his intellectual privacy invaded. Maybe showing his work was really his answer.

When he invited me to visit him on the Greek island of Hydra, I thought may be he was offering me a window to my blank canvas queries. Though when he described the life on the island, (also second homes to Leonard Cohen and David Gilmour) maybe there was a bit of joshing. I immediately felt there might be a huge task ahead. I thought my name might need (If I was to meet the offer/challenge) to end with a big “S” like Hercules or Aeschylus. I wasn’t sure if the invite was serious or was it something I could muster. I mean, “really” an invite from the knight of a generation?

My portrait archives are a window into my past certainly. But they also inform me of past cultural generations. The archives represent thousands of people who shared something from themselves to me.

In most cases after I completed my session I never saw the subject nor their ghost again. But I do feel the pang of loss. Part of the fabric of my life vanishes and I am left in the light of darkness. Reverie is quite a compelling place to consider another’s life.

The Architecture of Cities: Mexico City

August 10, 2023

The Architecture of Cities: Mexico City

What if you were going

I maintain a holding pattern inside the tailwind behind my Kestrel.

Hovering with anticipation my hawk is set to ambush its prey. She retracts her flaps. We tethered our plumes together. The ambush was successful. We descended to Mexico’s earth as an arrow intended for its bulls eye.

Landing in Mexico City can be a nightmare for me. I find being alone is both a catalog of horrors and unimaginable discoveries of beauty. I have learned to find my way. My mind’s place is a beautifully horrific place to be. I must have a few demons. But it is my world.

When I entered the city, I saw Roberto Bolano’s words and essays dressed in blackened calligraphy imprinted across Mexico’s sidewalks and streets as far as one eye can see. I then hopscotched between the pages of stories I knew: So many Bolano stories real and fictional. I knew new adventures were near to my mind or my imagination.

Bolano’s ghost accompanied me to architect Ricardo Legorreta’s Camino Real Hotel. I photographed the hotel for my Volume 1 “Portraits of the New Architecture” book. Ricardo had been a prince when we met. What better way to start a journey: the mythic literary Latin of language resting in one side of my brain and the power of an architect’s kindness inhabiting the other side of my brain. I began my march.

Finding a photograph is about deploying my fundamental approach to every moment: zoom in to decide what to utilize and what to eliminate: Zoom out to determine what needs to be included. That is the part of the ammunition I will use to locate and shoot the architecture of Fernando Romero, David Chipperfield and more.

Every time I land in Mexico I always try and honor my stay with the memory of the opening credits to the Malcolm Lowry/John Huston movie; Under the Volcano. The “Day of the Dead” skeletal dancing shadows filmed for the movie is mesmerizing beautiful. This particular story begins on “The Day of the Dead”.

I will walk day and night to find the purpose and the angle to celebrate my visuals.

My first stop is to come face to face with Fernando Romero’s designed Soumaya Museum. Supposedly it is a bit controversial. But upon laying my eyes on it, my camera salivated. It was the perfect combination of material and shape to address.

I am not a critic. I am not a critic to identify where and what category defines the piece. I am only here to make something that will find a home in my “Portraits of the New Architecture” Volume 2.

Sometimes I feel not like Cartier-Bresson capturing the moment, but instead I feel like Ansel Adams.

There is a moment in so many of Adams’ pictures where if he didn’t press the shutter release he would have failed. Failing is never in a photographer’s vocabulary. But the realization that there was a better moment to fire your camera is always there. It is just not what a psychologists can rip from the photographer’s mind.

The shapes, shadows, materials, footprint, geographical location and colors always matter. But the personality of the light is king. The light doesn’t speak to everyone: But maybe a photographer can hear when the light matters?

Standing in front of Soumaya I stretched the limits of my body. I raced left and right. I pondered. I stood and let my mind fly. I looked in every direction until: I accidentally? Inadvertently? looked across the plaza down this particular road. It was so very colorfully quiet: so many loud shadows and shapes. I searched for an explanation; In time, Emily Dickinson would eventually come to mind:

“This quiet Dust, was Gentlemen and

Ladies,

And Lads and Girls;

Was laughter and ability and sighing,

And frocks and curls.”

I think that is what I saw.

How a moment is trumpeted for your ears and eyes will always be a mystery: Without a warning or another indication I turned and found my picture. I think that is what I know.

Today the the one clear thought comes to mind: I have looked at this image for years. The moment became more than a snap. I have rummaged thought my brains intricacies for a bit. I realized this/my Soumaya is a twenty-first century homage to Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World”. I think this is what I see; so I share.

My day needed some reward not for the image, but to celebrate an exhausting journey among so many historical and cultural thoughts, I settled on a place for lunch. I remember the second floor.

To this day I cannot remember the name of the place. I just remember the cold beer. I put the bottle to my forehead and spotted a window looking out to where I just came from shooting.

I remember the next moment: It was a sighting I had not anticipated. Almost as if a brick and mortar structure could wink; There stood Museo Jumex. This was my second agenda, to find David Chipperfield’s design. Yes, there it stood waiting. I kept asking myself if this was the best shot? But it didn’t matter. This was my second Ansel Adams in one hour. As Ansel would, as my mentor Julius Shulman would, I made a snippety-snap-snap.

Later that day and the next, I came back to both buildings to see if what I saw was all I needed. Yes, I made some more pics of both: It is sort of the obligation if possible to shoot more than you need. I realized I was finished two days prior.

Now I could dance with the skeletal shadows that welcomed me days before. Then I could sit with my Bolano ghost in tow and talk about anything he wished me to listen to.

I did have more to accomplish:

I needed to have a serendipitous moment running into Sir Norman Foster. I needed to revisit buildings I had previously photographed: Destinations for food and enjoyment.

I needed to crisscross the city for the premier Sangrita. I needed to revisit Kahlo, Rivera, Bravo and and happen upon somethings new.

Mexico is a city that welcomes the eyes. Yes every adventure is about acclimating the eyes to new light, new culture and more.

It is impossible to share youth defined: But it is what I come back to for every camera adventure: I make photographs and travel to remember the first “aha” moment: To recall my youth and live tomorrow.

The Architecture of Cities: Washington, D.C.

August 03, 2023

The Architecture of Cities: Washington, D.C.

I have walked through the corridors of modern American history. The moments are like the silent cinema. The mouths move quite quickly. The voices are quite quiet. There are animated pauses. The chronology of our time matters less as time goes by. The silent power of Washington, D.C. whispers: “Listen”.

Photographers from history like Mathew Brady, Edward Curtis pleaded for the powers of D.C. to support their endeavors. They merely wanted to do in their time what I have spent decades doing: Recording components of our lives before it all vanishes: Some things have to be remembered.

I, at one time focused my camera on the Lincoln Memorial: Lincoln’s gaze in any light emboldens us. The contralto Marian Anderson once stood with arms widening. She gave us “My Country, ‘tis of Thee”.

Imagine tearing up to the anthem: One song, one statue and I realized I was meant to see history in one frame: Some say that a great voice aspires to ascend to the skies above: I think a great voice cascades down from the gods to us mere mortals. When the gods have spoken, a photographer should leave well enough alone. I nodded to Lincoln and celebrated Marian.

I put words in photos and photos in words.

This Washington, D.C. always makes me feel like I am parading naked through America’s most intimate secrets: I have never felt alone in this city because I am accompanied by voices; History’s voices.

When I have walked the six or so miles along Pennsylvania Ave, I always dream about all of my dreams: The stripping Congressman with the real life stripper: The famous Ted Kennedy signing my presidential campaign poster. The other Senator who ran for president escorting me to the museum hosting Paul Gauguin’s retrospective: My afternoon photographing a soon to be president: The snipers that held the city captive and protected the secrets after 9/11: The Museum Directors’ and curators who hosted me during other photography moments: Sitting with my mother at the W Hotel as an ex president elevated in a helicopter :destination unknown: The Blues vocalist who made Blues Alley my private sanctuary.

So many intimate historical moments for my eyes. It reminded me of a blind man telling me that the only way to really see is to be blind. I am always blinded by the events in my life, until I am here with you: Then there is this great moment of clarity that seems to whisper: “look”.

My good fortune in my photography life is that I am always on an imaginary transport: I am taken to a thousand fragments of the planet through the notion that there is something new to see: For me it is the science, math and art of architecture.

My mind travels faster than the speed of light. But the heart of the matter pauses with every single frame: My moment living with our built environment:architecture