Remembering Artists From Another Time: Joan Miró

Artist Joan Miro: Mallorca, Spain

Truthful Fictions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miles Davis.

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

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

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty XXXVI

Architect: Ricardo Legoreta

Truthful Fictions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Los Ángeles County Museum…many moons ago

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

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

My Marriage of light and texture

Remembering Artists from Another Time: John Piper

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was an awakening that I fell in love with.

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

Artist John Piper and his wife Myfanwy

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty XXXV

Architect: Santiago Calatrava in Milwaukee

Truthful Fiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Herbert Bayer: Santa Barbara, California

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

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

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

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

The Whitney Museum by Renzo Piano: New York City

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

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

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

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

Mercedes Museum, Stuttgart, Germany

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty XXXIV

London: Peckham Library: Architect: Will Alsop

Truthful Fiction

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

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

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

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

Tokyo: The Yoyogi National Stadium: Architect: Kenzo Tange

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty XXX111

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

Truthful Fictions

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

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

The Moment

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

Margaret Atwood

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

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

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

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

NYC: Virgin Hotel meets the Collegiate Marble Church

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

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

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

New York City: 42nd street convergence of …

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty XXX11

Just a Dream

Truthful Fiction

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

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

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

Cannon Street Station London

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

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

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

Broad Museum: Los Angeles: Diller and Scofidio Architects

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

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

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

Architect: Zaha Hadid: London Aquatics Center

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty XXX1

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

Truthful Fiction

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

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

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

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

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

Grasping for anything and everything in Bangladesh

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

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

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

converging shapes and colors in Barcelona

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

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

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

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

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

The Albertine Book Store in New York City

Architecture of Cities: Mapping BeautyXXX

Rotterdam Photo Museum and more

Truthful Fiction

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

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

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

Luxor Theater:Rotterdan

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

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

Toyo Ito Pavillion in Bruges, Belgium

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

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

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

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

Rem Koolhaas De Rotterdam skyscraper

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty XXIX

A collective of New York buildings

Truthful Fiction

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

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

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

Tokyo’s Apple Store

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tokyo: The National Museum of Modern Art

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty XXV111

Architect: Oscar Niemeyer: Los Angeles 1963

Truthful Fictions

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

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

Architect: Frank Lloyd Wright: Carmel, California

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

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

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

Architect: Charles Gwathmey: Malibu California

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

Architect: Ricardo Bofill: Barcelona, Spain

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty XXV11

An afternoon with a Guggenheim

Truthful Fictions

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

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

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

Architectural designs colliding at Hudson Yards NYC

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

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

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

Herzog and DeMeuron in New York City

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty XXVl

New York’s Chrysler among…

Truthful Fictions

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

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

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

A busy day in Bangladesh

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

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

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

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

Dubai Airport Interior

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

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

Interior of a palace in Jaipur, India

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty XXV

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

Truthful Fictions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The details of many: NYC

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

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

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

buildings under construction

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty XX1V The Last Building

Architect I.M Pei: Javits Center detail: New York

Fictional Truth

I use photography as a  memoirist might write. The self in reflection- -the reflection of the self: Possibly the greatest remembrance a picture can be in the hand held eyes:

The planet appears lonely: The continents afloat asea. Imaginative perspectives emotionally  amaze: Valhalla and nightmares appear like chaos and quietude: The photographer’s labyrinth emits warning signals: Majestic views ahead: A career of pleasurable burdens: Nothing stands alone: We navigate the unknown with a certain glee; Even in fear there is the promise- - and so we move forth:

The stories of architecture live in my many memories: They appear also as perspectives in Homer’s Odyssey, Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead and prominently in my travels. Sifted in the swell of dreams are imagined histories and simple truths.

Cinema’s  Wild Strawberries and  Lawrence of Arabia: equally allure my eyes to what the mind sees: It is akin to being a Magpie in the night: Mischievous thoughts stolen from experiences of others comfortably bedded in my camera’s format: A lifetime of a waking dream in plain sight: My reality is blessed.

Detail of Rafael Vinoly St. Regis Hotel New York City

Lost in Siena, Italy: The Palio di Siena heard imaginably: An intoxicating surround: A maze of stone and dreams: Something stood, posed, ahead: Something built with marble, clay and more: A secret front and centered: There is no known directional: The reward of a lifetime is to be lost in another world with a camera’s ammunition and a seek and adventure chirping desire. I never escaped the charm of being lost with discoveries at hand.

Every city sans gps: My sense of discovery supersedes my logic and I wander alone: What needs to be captured what needs to be lived before a forever vanishes before capture. It is the way photographs of cities become: No deserts, nor oceans lure my inspirations: To discover what may become- -The accident, the wrong turn, the mistake that cannot be retrieved- - that is where my eyes have always lived: 

There are places in between histories, that we know and histories to become: If only you could hear architect Frank Gehry say to me- -“how did you see that” referring to one of his buildings: My answer is “intuition”: The truth is- - The Thirteenth Tribe: A wandering migration to what I believed could be a capture destined: What follows is the unexplainable: Lost in Siena…is my everyday- -the only way I know to allow the camera to discover architecture in fractions: Shutter-speeds and dimensions are found with precisions- -discovered by happenstance.

Architect: Norman Foster: City Hall London, England

I edit my camera’s captures in rewind:The era of ages: Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Middle Ages and more are seen as archaeological digs. The camera makes every thing possible. 

Alone, I am always looking for the two dogs who know each other: They will lead me to the open air: The Siena Cathedral: Somewhere in Dublin or Barcelona: Somewhere in Chicago or Dhaka: They will lead I will follow.

Alone history warns  an army of eyes: Take a breath quickly and equally slowly from where you stand: Make a soft pirouette of the mind: See what you see: Photograph to travel through time: Travel to remember- - remember where you have traveled: Memory reminds: A bow to Proust is in order.

My photography of architecture is not unlike Borges’ The Library of Babel: Every second I consider the infinite: There is everything to consider and much to lay your eyes on: The flood of history the stories of faded glories, the intimate reveal- - the capture and begin again.

Architect: Norman Foster: 425 Park Avenue: New York City

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty:XX111

New York City’s WTC and more

Truthful Fiction

It takes two to Tango: Every photograph I make is a dance: A recipe with a dash of phantasmagoria  and Applied Science: Two words, two worlds hinged together by vocabulary- -creatively: The two conceptual mindsets nest alongside- - Holding a secret whisper inside my camera: The conscious and unconscious life. The visual experiences likens the cotton of sheep and the steel of industry intermingling: Billions witness this stage enactment as if admiring the flight of a boomerang. Then again we dance. 

Phantasmagoria is where I live when my mind and body are en route- -en route to visit an unexpected or entertain an expected capture. Sherlock Holmes had his seven-per-cent-solution, Coleridge exposed his  “Kubla Khan’’  unrestrained dreamscapes: I merely imagine: camera in hand I march towards somewhere almost anywhere creating uninhibited fantasy’s- -uninhibited truths. The visual ideas seen in my footsteps and architecture’s  footprints arrive and vanish as quickly as the imagination allows. 

Park Complex and East River Development: East River Plaza

Photography is an adventure where fantasy is fused with an imaginary not yet experienced: Applied Sciences are the home of the practical and manufactured mechanisms that are utilized to build- -and fuse the chemical and material: The promise of invention poses and sits before the eyes and invites the imagination- -the fictional truth.

Cities are introduced to my camera: Cities that I have not known- -They may vanish and maybe rebirthed: Time is not on my side: Two-hundred plus countries live on the planet: Innumerable cities arrive and pass as in passed: I must hurry- -we must hurry: Dreams are accumulating: Dreams are here and then:

I step into my dreams the same way I step into movies: I was side by side with Jean Gabin in Pépé Le Moko: The Casbah was ours: I was side by side with Kirk Douglas in The Detective: New York was ours: I was side by side with Orson Welles in The Lady from Shanghai: Multiple cities were ours.

I daily remind my camera that we are alive in worlds not ours: I daily Step into Liquid as the surfing documentary begs: I want to be alive in worlds not quite yours- -not quite mine: Alive in worlds larger than we allow ourselves to venture into: I invite phantasmagoria into my mind and I step into liquid and there again the shutter is released- -and so I dream: I need to live:

Architect David Adjaye: Washington DC: Smithsonian National Museum Of African American History

There are no checkmates in my photography: The science of dreams the dreams that become science are hidden places like spare cupboards where I can stash away moments for tomorrow- -imaginary moments to apply the science and imagination of photography to capture something and almost anything:

I stood in Agra: I stood in Rio: I stood inside the oceans’ waves, the desert’s sands and the apex of mountains- -I have come to believe that Lewis Carroll’s “Alice is real”- -Ursula K. Le Guin’ science fiction is truthful and Tolkiens middle earth is near by: How else do I explain dreaming while constructing a photograph in mind and in truthful fiction?

Charles Sheeler and Edward Weston for example never merely snapped a photograph: They constructed images: They manufactured tones and shapes to accommodate their ideas: Their photography of architecture was never a shutter release away: They recorded moments: They manufactured  exposures: They considered how and why to utilize chemicals: Phantasmagoria and Applied Sciences seen in architecture’s history- -Photography’s history: Addressed in their time and in real time: I can only imagine the  photographs I dream about: Then I continue in my very own playpen.

Architect: Moshe Safdie: Detail of Washington D.C: United States Institute of Peace Headquarters

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty XX11

Architect: Herzog and DeMeuron: “56 Leonard” New York City

Truthful Fiction

Alchemists sweep into the chambers: Mozart descends: The Magic Flute is heard.

The genius is followed as in tow: A dozen draped in drab transparency: There is a pause: The cabal of mystics circle the composer: The serious crucibles and unknown apparatus fill the known perimeter: The maestro plays.

A pause in progress: A whispering chant ensues: “Ring Around the Rosies” echos: The science and creative music that is Mozart is thrust into centuries ahead: The alchemists’ manifest potions for greatness:

Whispers are heard: Whispers are seen: Invention is about- -the music plays: We picture whispers: We begin to see what we hear. In Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers we heard Chopin’s Mazurka in A Minor: A mere assembly of chords stirred the elixirs- -mystic senses imagined: 

Leonard Bernstein’s Westside Story was a cinematic first: The ears leaned to hear the code of the streets: A call from the New York wilds beckoned:

The Beatles never hesitated to grab our ears as the initial  jarring chords awakened our eyes to 

A Hard Days Night:

Who was not romanced as Robert DeNiro sparred alone to the Intermezzo from Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana:

Dizzy Gillespie’s cheeks blasted: A myriad of senses walked into The Cool World: The authentic Harlem: Foreign territory- -life emboldened  for some.

In the Mood for Love- -Yumeji’s  Shigeru Umebayashi tempts our romantic core. We forever move to keys of life.

Music, the ultimate lure: Exotica or mere romance: Sensory perceptions invite you extend your beliefs: To lend your arms and feet to dance Anthony Quinn’s Zorba’s Dance.

Architect: Zaha Hadid: “520 West 28th Street” NYC

The alchemy that accompanies my captures is a consciousness of great joy: Most importantly the musical sound from movies heard speaks as a companion might along my million mile walk: Tens of thousands of movies reveal a chord or string of notes that set a stage for more to happen.

My eyes live in a constant tilt and shift: It is part of an emotional lure towards captures but yes it is the music that tends to inform what the camera is privileged to see- -The confession is not mine alone- -

The great photographers (and there are certainly many in this category) Eugene Smith and Ansel Adams come to mind- -They  have addressed the importance of music in their lives in their photography> I am merely a naive with a camera- - Like a two year old lured by something colorful or candy- -cinema is my candy colored magic- -it narrates my life’s movements- -my life’s composition. A photographer is never alone: He/she is transported through time and millenniums to make sense of what they see- -drawn/lured by what they hear.

Architect Herzog and DeMeuron: Parrish Museum: Southampton New York

If for a fraction of your life you freeze frame moments in Fellini’s 8 1/2, Orson Welles’ A Touch of Evil, and Godards’ Breathless you may see what I dream to accomplish: Sound and fury, peace and philosophy in one single frame: The three and more films have multiple moments that stolen my eyes- -frozen my ambitions>and then there is more:

We see what we can imagine: If to imagine traveling a million miles to dream is my reality- -so be it: I have lived with an imaginary  army of alchemists for decades: Each day an elixir: Each day an invention from the mind: Each day I hear the tension on my cameras shutter-release: I feel what  Fellini, Welles have seen what they have heard: I have tried to manner their potions:

I travel to where the music plays: Japan, Greece, Sweden France across this continent and more to feel that tension atop my shutter-release- -to breathe what I see: if my circle of alchemists make potions and hypothesis real- -the pleasure of the madness will gather:

I would dance naked atop the whales of the seven seas for that pleasure: Magic lives: One day what is captured will be erased or vanquished

Energy Building: Con Edison: New York

Architecture of Cities XX1: Mapping Beauty

New York City: Hudson Yards: Architect part Skidmore, Owings and Merrill

Truthful Fiction

Louis Aragon’s Le Passage de l‘ Opéra: A cul de sac of French arcades: The home to history’s stories- - not Aragons’. The “…Passage…” belonged to Paris, France. I imagined arriving at dusk: I imagined stories not mine revealed: I imagined whimsically tapping about as if in a fictional Playpen. The Playpen where memories resided as destinations- -Where destinations became memories:

There and other retreats, realized as tales told in photo novels: 

Vanishing worlds revealed: A shadow of time  appears: The remains are ours: Aragon desperately wanted the future to remember the past: Aragon’s forsaken, forgotten passage is a lamentable loss: elixir of life crushed by time on earth and ultimately vanished: The moment of memory frozen in “tenses”. Imaginations transport our lives: We all pose and dance nakedly: We all suspect we are somehow enjoined: If we may imagine- - Henri Matisse’s Dance(1).Paris, Boulevard des Invalides: If my camera can step out of my reality; If the day after is imagined- -is beyond our imagination.

   The film director Billy Wilder’s  beloved art collection was not about something collective: It was about cities and continents: Passions crisscrossing the planet for the pleasurable spectacle that is art: To trace “Billy“ might be akin to galloping strides. He stood where oxygen breathed: He was an enlightened filmmaker and art collector: He was in Paris with Kirk Douglas: I know “Billy” was in New York with a friend: I know Billy was in Los Angeles with an art dealer: I know he was in many cities for the sake of art: If to trace his steps I might  imagine his conversations: I might see his cities and cityscapes through the eyes of Sabrina’s and Ray Millands’. I  might witness “Billy’s” flashflooding  of visual curiosities: Elevated passions, canvases while traversing Sunset Boulevards: The Wilder urban landscapes might dance like Matisses’ “Dance(1)”. His pleasures are dangerously so near the sun: A dash of life’s pleasures- -seen in the eyes my Nikon’s world captured across from the forever “Billy”.

Rotterdam Train Station

   I have an undying admiration for Humphrey Bogart: The actor hustled chess games from New York City’s Central Park to Coney Island: He stepped often into the sixth avenue arcades: He scurried between games and parts of the city that can seem like rounding the Indianapolis “Brickyard” 500 numerous times: The Bogart urban chess lore was never about chess alone: He was hustling for a course in survival with a wry amusement: 

Bogart hustled New York’s three-hundred square miles of elevated rails and underground subways at horse racing speed for the joy of the hustle, the joy of a experience: Certainly the exuberance captured my camera’s imagination: My imaginary eyes saw across my city grit and pleasure: My single reflex in dream considered millions of photographs in Bogart’s eyes: 

There, is always me: Fleet and wired my city could imaginatively be seen as in rooks, knights, bishops, and a few queens and kings: To see the city as if a Casablanca “Rick”, a “Maltese…’ like Sam Spade: To measure the game of chess the streets of the city’s boroughs and Hollywood’s eyes all in a single frame: I may as well had been a pawn in Bogart’s urban lore.

New York City’s Con Edison and

My life began at eight years old: I sat watching the Super Panavision widescreen version of Lawrence of Arabia: In one hand I held my grandmother’s hand: In the other I balanced my Coke and chocolates: I never heard David Lean the director yell “cut”. That evening of Oscar proportions was my initiation: Film, fantasy and life.

Years later I learned that  Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif escaped the arduous film schedule of the  desert asylum for the nearest and bestest cosmopolitan life style to be had: Another education of sorts: Carousing defined: Drinking, gambling and essentially dissolution of your known self was on full display in the Paris of the Middle-East: Beirut.

My camera imaginatively navigated the naked winds and vanishing perspectives: Jordanian deserts and Andalusian country sides appeared: The world awaited  the arrival of Kings and hungry Hollywood kings: The  ballad sounds of Middle-Eastern Fairuz and the toreador enchanting Bolero sounded the welcome to O’Toole and Sharif: They came to relax and play: My camera if, if was my reality saw only the shadows of histories before my time: Cities and landscapes awaited my captures: Everything is frozen in time as my dreams are seen on screens and realities captured in 20mm.

Layering of a moment in 125th of a second

Architecture of Cities XX: Mapping Beauty

Even the average become a canvas

Truthful Fiction

The Way We Live Now: Anthony Trollope 

I imagined an urban wilderness of millions- -alone. A Salvador Dali like commune of dancing eyes appeared on the universes’ stage: I felt a joyful neurosis: I saw a stratosphere of kaleidoscopic layered colors splayed in VistaVision: Widescreen visual images like a memoir of pointedly broken down framed 35-mm celluloid fragments: Unimaginable passions sit and await before the camera everyday: There in an organic clarity with a hint of the “I”: 

John Ford’s The Searchers rewinds- -fast forwards and repeats. Monument Valley remains my North Star: If it was not for the movie I might never have known about the photographer Edward S. Curtis: My passions for the framed picture, the frozen Ford moment in VistaVision, “I” revisit in every second of my days with all of the years behind and ahead: I step inside and listen to the apparent quietude: The high amplitude seen in the voluminous desert sounds that will one day no longer remain: 

Color is everything in my cities

The rare, the poised pose: The interlocking I and eye encounter: The eyes illuminate: The “I” absorbs: My mind sits in flux: My Circadian Rhythm’s felt as a few ounces of smoke drift wind: The watchful eye in capture mode-settings near infinity: All of the details in mind: Anthony Trollope’s title page (The Way We Live Now) becomes a subtitle for every image I have seen and made

The ordinary that remains common: The common that may be surreal: Cultural change in urban cities can be an architectural phenomenon—the phenomenon can be the city’s architecture: From block to block— county to county—state to state—country to country—continent to continent and the galaxies above—seen, can be pure intimate transparent cultural anthropology. The entire world rests like paper raffles in a straw hat begging to be chosen-chosen to be seen: Every step I have made needs a capture: 

World’s not mine: The Chester Himes’  A Rage in Harlem appropriately becomes an idea for my stories: I have walked in mind and mindfully taken infinite steps in an array of locations and imaginations: I remember walking from New York’s Coogan’s Bluff to Sugar Hill: A short stretch with remarkable history: For the slightest movements I often assemble thousands of partners (authors musicians artists and of course architects) to be enjoined in my musings: This particular rendezvous called for a meeting of adventurers of all reputations: I invited Conrad, Maugham, Greene, to- journey, my journeys). Himes’ narratives trace and travel through lands planted for Baseball, Blues Music and another kind of anthropology left behind: A single frame seen in my minute history leaves a remnant of a fossilized truth for posterity: I recorded the minute with a hint of the grand.

My Heart and Eyes return to Architect Fernando Romero’s museum in Mexico City

World’s not mine: The cameras’ life from California’s San Gabriel Mountains and near Altadena: Author Zane Grey’s home posed for my camera: Grey’s famous Riders of the Purple Sage, is a Western: Like Himes in New York, Grey’s presence in Hollywood was formidable:  In mind I marched the distance between the mountains and Altadena: A mere whisper from Grey’s voice offered me a look into a past: Imagined stories of days and years before my time. The early days of simple Hollywood “Flicks” merged eventually like a highway to the arrival of Baseball: Baseball and Hollywood, Hollywood and Baseball: Stories of conquest and romance, romance and folklore landing again in a single frame of my imagination: Hollywood rolls into Los Angeles’ Chavez Ravine: Baseball and VistaVision arrive in my consciousness: This geography this burgeoning culture became a new history for my camera filled with tantalizing stories- -cultural secrets:  My camera begs to capture more- -and then I imagine more.

More world’s not mine: Randomly. I recall some and all of my influences: Who comes to mind? Everyone:Mark Twain’s Huck Finn traveled down the Mississippi: Cervante’s Don Quixote rode across middle Spain: More and more fiction: More stories to capture in dreams and reality: Centuries not mine become a cause for my camera: My camera and me: It is the intersection where the melange of ideas penetrate my eyes for my every tomorrow. The worlds between are where the images reside. The angle of repose is the mantra within: Everyday is The Way We Live Now.

Oddly enough: Rafael Vinoly’s 432 Park Avenue looming over Philip Johnson’s AT&T Building New York City

Architecture of Cities XIX: Mapping Beauty

A Marriage of styles and

Truthful Fiction

“Knitting Histories” 

I have been knitting histories together for decades: There was never a master plan: I realized that everyday, every siting, every capture and voice had the tiniest thread of meaning: Each piece of matter has made a tapestry of events: 

The days I imagined became a novella imagined: There has not been a single capture that could not be a fictional account: But my days have been weirdly real: Quilted logic gathered: Mythopoetic dreams appear: Daily I feel the acceleration of passions unleashed: Mapping beauty becomes as it became a play about architectural history unveiled: It is a desirous endeavor: The iconic and the common have posed as part of an unquenchable universe that matters: Home may be Montezuma, or a playpen of Modernists and Brutalists designs: The unimaginable awaits: Pyramids and dozens of curvaceous adamantine are there to be seen in my films.

I imagine I have had Telekinetic relationships with my cameras for decades: Every slight site I might see, I might hear is captured: My companionship with said reflex cameras seems like a good place to call home.

Seconds in Dubai

The world I pass through is not mine: Vision is nothing without voices: It belongs to the voices of others: My world once, was a list of names and voices played out across continents and cities- - like a children’s game of Jacks: Oscar Niemeyer, Joan Didion, Andy Warhol, Yo Yo Ma, Edward Kennedy, Joan Miro, David Hockney, Kirk Douglas, Miles Davis, Gore Vidal, Frank Gehry, and thousands more saw my camera through their eyes. History mattered: I was invited into the lair of others:

I respect the invite: The unimaginable exchange of words- -the presence of minds will never be forgotten: Yet outside of those many thousands of thousand moments I am on my own to dig up the exculpatory proof that I have lived: What matters is there is a trace: Then the volumes of discoveries become my private celebration.

“Mapping Beauty” is remembering the boundaries the pitter-patter my steps echoed along the travels of time: My master plan was an unintentional dictionary’s version of happenstance: I gravitated towards the bigger universe- - to see the entirety: Yet over time I cropped universes and  narrowed perspectives to fit my own identity: I realized as I walked in the steps of the famed and common, I gathered (like prey saving for another day) a set of empirical ideas: 

Along the Netherland’s Rails

Ahead of sight, another way of life splayed ahead- -Parisian Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the Copenhagen Finger Plan, the grids of Washington D.C,  Corbusier’ Chandigarh, Niemeyer/Costa Brasilia laid the premise for a new direction: I only needed to determine how far I would need to travel- -travel to understand the complexity of an unknown agenda: I daily measure the distance between waves as the seafarer I imagine. The inexplicable lies between each wave as a needed template to imagine my ways.

With tools and toys in hand- - my heart appears: I imagine things in solitude like the (Forest-Witch), scientist, ecologist and natural phenomenon  Simona Kossak- - I too am alone in my own private nature: Architecture is my forest it is where and why I preserve my celluloid: The silence that Kossak lived within Poland is not mine: My silence is filled with a bounty of cacophony but I believe my eyes capture the silence: As Kossak studied the natural among wolves, my silence lives in everyday built captures- -I preserve my everywhere : I imagine my everything: I imagine a lilt among wolves- -I am imagine peering over the shoulder  of Beatrice Potters’ charming animated days: My camera sees the natural world with a profound remembrance: I see the only world I know: I cannot explain, but I always carry Miles Davis’ Dingo in case I need to realize my imagination is almost real.

Frank Gehry and