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

Architecture of Cities XV111: Mapping Beauty

The Queens Museum: Renovation Architect: Grimshaw

Fictional Truth

Miles and miles…of celluloid have captured the embodiment of my realities: The reels of stories I have seen for a few lifetimes do not merely invigorate the eyes, they act like reels and realms of fireflies impregnating the skies: My mind ignites and gravitates closer to the OLED screen. I have a  powerful need to be closer to film’s truths: Their stories are ours but mostly mine: The dreams filled with popcorn and malted chocolate balls. I daily find  refuge in my sanctuary of futures.

I have repeatedly witnessed the actor as Pharaoh, Gangster, Nazi hunter and Poker gambler. Films’ star Edward G. Robinson was always my little giant. A genuinely short man who played characters larger than life: A generational and beyond favorite: His,  most audacious  character that tangled with my hearts’ eyes and infatuated my imaginations was the naked little man from Soylent Green:

The entire Eddie G. film catalog is spell binding:  His performance as Sol in Soylent Green (the book researcher/hoarder) I see as the ghost of my future past. 

Shenzhen Industrial Plant

Robinson’s Sol learned the truth about our future and his past in one swift cinematic performance: The role compelled him to make a difference even before his death a few weeks beyond film completion. In the climatic scene he walked to his final destination as if holding my hand as my grandfather once had: He made his funeral arrangements and snuggled in a hospital to savor his posterity: The screen swiftly presented  Sol watching his cherished past encumber the present. The exhausting CinemaScope beauty of another time (played on his hospital screen as I watched from my movie theater screen): His life’s Fantasia passing before all of us was never to be seen again- -I imagined: His painful serenity in the migrating tonal darkness of a life before and possibly the near ending ahead is among the character’s reasons he chose euthanasia to end his stay on earth: Stirred (never shaken) and stirred again: The lethal injection ghosting equally as a elixir and placebo for him became a North Star for me. I knew then and know now, I will rest like Sol with a stirring end: 

Everyday I encapsulate my dreams with the likes of Sol’s and other multiple reels of film: I imagine as I watch film story after another I listen for the projector pulling film slowly through the sprockets: I dream I stood with Eddie in kinship: My silhouetted standing six foot three: Eddie G’.maybe five foot three standing as Mice and Men’s(Lennie and George) in kinship: We watched our worlds in evolution free fall: It was as if we were framed as beauty embedded in nature’s enviable bliss- -I imagined: Our vanishing worlds’.

Rotterdam Special: KCAP Architects

I lifted my ear to listen for a magicians wand as it waves goodbye to Soylent Greens’- -in a dream: it all seems too real: Sol, nearly naked and nearly death laid back to grasp his life’s final glimpse: My worlds’, Sol’s world mingle  for a final non-emotional bereavement. Something magnetically guided me towards the enviable “more”: I stepped forth passing by into another time. More time…

I, alone stare hopefully at everything a lifetime of captures has produced> I see Soylent Green’s fictional world> I just want everything in my world to matter: I wave to Sol one more time with something in mind- -The extinct Kaua’i’ō ō.

Just as it is said that the Kaua’i’ ō’ō called out in vain for his mate: You must imagine the emptiness of a world no longer yours as you pass and the world you have always imagined- - is no longer.

So here I sit: I listen and wonder how it all may end- -and then again…  

A unique angle of Kengo Kuma Bridge in Yusuhara, Japan

Architecture of Cities XV11: Mapping Beauty

Barcelona: Natural Gas Building: Architect EMBT: Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliabue

Truthful Fiction

I trust my manic maniac calm: I trust the camera everyday and thereafter. There is no mundane in routines that is me. Voices in my camera project visions: Fabulous voices my cameras see are my eyes’ visions: There is value in what my eyes have yet to see:

If the camera, my camera, saw a stone or an entire community splayed naked, my neural reaction would be the same. My camera’s common eyes see every footprint every movement equally- -until my lenses define the need for more.

Cities are my prey: A single frame is realized in an idea: There is nothing arbitrary about my agendas; My photographs are not arbitrarily made: They are made to represent something more: They are framed by primary colors: They are framed by shapes- -Photography shapes the things to come: 

Shenzhen, China: Abandoned Factory: I lectured and taught a class for Ole Bauman

Within a diverse set of environments I occasionally recognize the polymeric connection- -like a slew of buildings seen as imaginary realities; The silence posing before colored shadows maneuvering in the light: The science of photography unfolds like armies in the nights:  A wall of neural tissues stand upright: Visualized in rare sightings: The artist Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series imagined across skylit skies: Henri Matisse’s Jazz and Morocco periods extend the imaginary: The skies become patterned dreams. History’s  centuries carry my movement for others to see: Colored shadows illuminate- -“us”. My camera prepares to make invasions across cities inhabited by the- -seen and unseen. They are there and my photographs await to be taken.

What is it like to be a witness to changing aesthetics, changing concepts, and part of the age of change in every breath- -My imagined memories know: My eyes witness the tales my memory shares: Story telling becomes my camera’s identity: I travel to new destinations creating new chapters- -histories filled with new realities: I search for a home for my captures: 

I would love for the captured/images to embody the exaggerated fictions of the William Blakes, Issac Asimovs, and Philip K. Dicks: Alas their illustrations and illuminated lives are worlds not mine: I am more inclined towards comfort nesting in imaginary fictions- -true fictions by possibly Somerset Maugham’s Ashendon or Graham Greene’s human factors experienced in Our Man in Havana- -Simple, clean lines, worlds broadly imagined: I can imagine truth in their fiction… fictions truth. Their stories are to be believed as real.

Architect: Rafael Moneo: Barcelona: Puig Tower

My imagined world hurries me to new beginnings: Shenzhen alone would never be enough: Behind Shenzhen- -China awaits; Centuries, and lasting global impact appear beyond: I ventured inside the Georgian borders looking for Tblisi: Centuries before and histories ahead: Beyond the borders the Russian continents await: I didn’t travel to Bangladesh for Bangladesh: The collective histories of the Asian continents equally mattered: If life in Rio de Janeiro was all that I had seen in South America I would have bemoaned the missing of the continents’ collective cultural energies: Photographing in my continent reminds…To photograph the historical anthropological migration to North America from the North, South, East and West- -might be like traveling through a whiteout of fairy dust: Dreams beyond the imaginary await.

 Imagine living a life where 100,000 captures become a card deck of memories: The entire narrative of a life lived resting atop a shattered window: Imagine a wavering, wayward baseball thrown where a single tree has fallen in the forest: The remains are a single encapsulated frame of a lifetime that not a soul has seen or heard- -The eyes of my cameras have seen: What awaits is the anxious patience for more.

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Architect Oscar Niemeyer: “ Casa DasCanoas “

Architecture of Cities XV1: Mapping Beauty

Architect: Renzo Piano: Building: KPN Tower: Rotterdam

Truthful Fiction

There is a woman who gestures towards me every night: The city stands alone- -I see: The woman  leans like a 1940s starlet in dressed in ready: She the poseur slightly wisps in the lights: Every night silhouetted across, against and over the many metropolises’ sky line- -she awaits- -her poses- - remain the same; Her shadowy frame only heard in shadowy reverberations - -she is there: 

Again and again the night brings her into my camera my camera to her: I have a friend in the darkness of the night- - the light before the morning. Every night; The shadow as it will, moves: 

The words remain the same- -“walk with me” I imagine. “Take a look at my city if you trust- -you must” I imagine. “I extend a promise to see”. I imagine every night.

What happens when no one is around to hear what you see- -to see what you hear?

What happens when you realize what you are imagining is not an imagination.

New York City: Grand Central

I often ask my camera to remember Joan Didion- - often I do: I am in this moment reminded of her sitting atop the hood of her grandfathers pick-up truck: When she shared the story in the midst of our portrait session- - I realized maybe thirty years set our lives apart- -more than thirty years apart: We watched as she recounted: The rattlesnake was killed instantly: The jolt of the idea of a blast from the past made me wince: Joan didn’t flinch- -she always remembered- -as well…Joan gestured to my mind. I wanted to see what she wanted me to see. There are things in the lights of days then and now: They remain with you in mind and sight of mind.

I have had one dream and some more: My camera waits for the new unidentified wildernesses to arise alive. The wilderness where and when my camera captures something new to share- - within my future’s past:

Discovering a voice to make captures is easy: Discovering my own voice is when the science of imagination begins- -like the great Satchmo singing Mack the Knife- -The unimaginable appears in mind and sight, sight of mind. The communion of imaginary thoughts will one day locate into memory- -then possibly near the end, a slow fade from the mind.

I camera begins anew and again anew: The days and years pass- -not a second redacted: The goal was never to invent a new way or manner of photography: The historical emotional daily narrative stands before me today and beyond: Thee of time and light need to be explored with every aperture idea: Time and again the “…Space Odyssey…” that is Kubrick’s  beckons my eyes as Didion’s rattlesnake beckons my desires: New to be born babies flying through space- -takes its course- -The iconic ape wielding and tossing a giant femur into time travel: Floating before an orchestra of stars the bone as baton conducts our eyes:

Rotterdam

The litany matters: Footprints afoot: Rare and exotic theories about the origins of camera sightings remind- -Hannibals Carthaginians’ crossing the Alps atop elephants: The elephants on tippy toes espy the descent from the highest peaks- -Their eyes nearly two inches wide frightened to the core bellowing “Not I”: Naturalists’ William Henry Hudson writes with truthful imaginations about the voices he may have heard- -His assiduous study’s of plants or animals seemingly conversing in real time: May they only speak to him- -though it is us who captures in sight the voluminous possibilities. My white elephants (Hemingways’ but so close to my heart) shed their fears on hills with shadows: Plain light exposed is never enough: So it is with that I stand in front of erected metropolises sharing what the cameras’ eyes say upon discovery, discoveries of what needs to be seen and seen again.  

Can it be the exquisite burning skin aroused in the burning barren desert that the adventurer, discoverer Stanislaw d’Escayrac de Lauture’s awakened in his travels alone in the Sudan desert.

Can it be the cameras’ magical incantations that we might share with d’Escayrac de Lauture as the heat swelters the mind descends and equally ascends into imaginaries.

Let’s take one more glimpse of Victor Hugos’ castles- -Waimeas’ thunderous waves- -Albrecht Dürer’ search for the unfathomable whale and we might catch a glimpse of the camera’s life.

Think of this past within all the known written and visual context. My camera allows only for a single frame and what may follow- -A minor afterburn. Maybe the camera looks back in the moment: Maybe the camera remembers: Maybe things we have seen remain alive in our thoughts. 

Rotterdam Central Train Station

Architecture of Cities XVI: Mapping beauty

Architect:Louis Kahn: The Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park: New York City

Truthful Fiction: Memorials and Monuments

If you could see what my eyes hear: You might hear the irrepressible whispers by Robert Frost. 

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.”

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening lends itself to every sound to be seen in mine and J.M Barrie’s never lands: The  imaginary focus that speaks to every living organism that is no longer but has a voice: The stories below the surface: Stories for everyone to hear if only they allow themselves to see.

We see what we imagine to hear: A million bats escape from Bracken Texan Preserve: The sound like a wall of cacophony: Scurrying and fleeing remain; the bats leave a trail- -The mystery of light in shards. I have stood before the toll of memorials that stand as monuments:

The Washington Monument: Washington D.C

Tom Waits rasps near: He tells stories of Cherokees and Kiowa scurrying and nurturing land: Their storied souls from Mississippian ranges to the Great Lakes and Kiowa’s British Columbia merge: Separate voices, the wealth of one unite: A giant wave hovers; something bigger is near.

Another monumental memorial appears: Anonymous ghosts are seen dancing naked atop a planet of oceans: I realize there is more to see more to be heard: There is everything visual everything visceral- -Quiet is heard. A mass of memorials circle the planet as stars and passions: More memories realized: We travel as one across the moon:

Every body every turn in time: passion is revealed in various guises: Yusef Lateef’s love theme for Spartacus begins- -The eyes in mist, Kirk Douglas and Jean Simmons imagine: The topography before the Roman engagement: Love in the ruins: Ghosts abound: More stories within: Heartbreaks, love and excited enticement remembered: I stood alone.

Alive I yell to anyone who might listen- -alone I surround the monuments that are memorials: A lilt of step a lilt of voice: The plaintive me imagines the plants before there were flowers: I realize the dearth and equally the abundance of storytelling to be seen and possibly heard: Every capture need not make sense of the day-today- and tomorrow’s day to be: Yesterday’s unfathomable everything whispers and again I see more.

9/11 Memorial: New York City

Two men and their steeds: (With every static structure in view, I imagine worlds to remember). Count Rostov in awe of Napoleon’s Arabian Stallion: The Night of the Hunter’s (Robert Mitchum) Rev. Harry Powell (imagined in horror by the little boy John) in silhouette atop a tendon aged mule: One story  portends the heroic another the horror: We see what we imagine to hear.

Imagine the presence of histories told: An incredible elixir to marshal into the future with: The past speaks we march again: A space revels with narratives: Across the globe in languages both familiar and foreign we are witness to memories.

“In the meantime, I am alive, I move about.”

Charles Lamb

Robert E. Lee Monument: New Orleans: Removed in 2017

Architecture of Cities XVI: The Legacy of Frank Gehry

Frank Gehry: Architect: Detail of Disney Hall: Los Angeles, California

Death becomes us: We announce our arrivals and departures: We were here. Death resonates. It is finite.

Vulnerability is something fragile: A state of the heart and mind filled with keys and chords that play in various languages of emotions: Vulnerability may be mankind’s rarest and exclusive reveal:

I had shot Frank Gehry’s portrait on three separate occasions: the last time I saw him was at a dinner with architects Richard Wurman, Moshe Safdie, maestro Yo Yo Ma and more.

The last portrait I made was for a new project. The project about client/architect relationships: That day we had spent an hour when- - I raised my eyes from filming to freeze frame: Frank had tears in his eyes: The moment could have been pulled from Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead (the hero protecting integrity with vulnerable fragility aka passions.) The moment might have been seen as a singular musical string not heard: Possibly a vulnerable remembrance in the midst: He began to cry real tears; it was not bawling: It was the naked emotional reveal: His heart was spent: I continued to capture one frame at a time: 

The shutter’s reverberation heard, seemed to beg for more- - Frank’s eyes swelling up- -I paused the camera- -He finished his story. He felt a bit embarrassed- -like a man wading naked alongside Poseidon- -like the first time a man lifts his toupee to reveal a known truth: I only heard Frank’s lips uttering- -Please don’t show these pictures: 

My response convinced him to continue: I would not allow a soul to see the pics in tears. The most famous architect in the world was trusting me- -saying, “Hello.”

Frank Gehry: Architect: In his studio: Los Angeles California: Sitting in a chair he designed

My camera has seen revealing vulnerability shared in many moments: Zaha Hadid, Oscar Niemeyer, Philip Johnson and more had shared secrets, stories and passions: A few thousand portraits in my career- -my eyes delight in the whispers the whispered…the worlds’ that are not mine, yet meant to be seen if only for my fractional focus. The Gehry heart driven by visceral passions are my keepsakes: His reveal was pure raw sacrificing pulsating heart of a mind’s soul.

The train bounced from New Haven to New York. I had spent a day and change as part of the Yale Architectureal Review: I was looking out the window: The sky’s clock was anew: I could see day fold into twilight: I remembered railing about the importance of the camera in architecture. A bunch of heavy weights led by Greg Lynn were participating: Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Stanley Tigerman and more: Their eyes mostly rolled up somewhere above. I did catch Gehry and Zaha nodding in my favor. It. Was a good day to remember.

There is something intimate about sitting on a train; Connecticut views were vanishing: The world passes you- -you pass through the world: I dream of remaining in the utopia in view: I awakened to a certain intimate reality- -I was sitting next to Frank Gehry: It was me and Frank: The moments  most famous name in architecture: Quickly the train compartment was devoid of any sounds but the wheels on the tracks. In the quiet I asked him if he would like to see his “works” in my pictures. I handed him my Iphone. I have photographed Frank three times over the years. This moment was a bit different: I watched his eyes> He wasn’t merely looking> he was examining the details that he had designed: His eyes and mind disappeared into a mirrored reflection of a life lived- -possibly foretold.

A very attractive woman was trying to gain his attention: He looked in her direction: He looked back at me: He was clear about what mattered: His eyes leaned into his work- -my photograph- -the eye on the prize. Eyes up: “How come I have never seen this perspective before.”

Unique architectural designs beg to be touched: It was Jacques Herzog who taught me that. To feel the materials is to know something more: To integrate dreams with intellectual reality: The meaning of something built from the soul: The naked meaning of what “more” can look like: Everyone photographs the Frank Gehry shapes- -as they should: Though to allow yourself to fondle and caress any and every Gehry’- -illuminates the reality: 

Architect: Frank Gehry: Spruce Street: New York, New York

Sometimes, until you caress reality, history is a “Rubik” of false rumors:  Imagine Homer’s Odysseus view of Troy, the Cyclops and the beautiful Sirens: Real or imagined when you think about what you are told or have read about…it appears in your mind as a nepenthe: Then the light of a legacy become real: Dreams remain embedded for lifetimes: The legacy of Bilbao became alive for millions- - states of reverie for others: Stammering cameras sprint(ed) across nations: An ounce of history may be captured: The army of notions capturing a Frank Gehry is marching forward: A journey to Mecca is afoot.

One day Frank asked me to photograph his Maggie’s Centre in Dundee, Scotland>I cannot explain my judgement but I did not make that day happen: Emotionally the project honored a cancer center a friend in Charles Jencks and his wife Maggie. I will always remember my remiss: I will imagine what the building may have looked like in person through my lens: I will imagine what it would felt like to caress- -and toy with what might have been.

Do I speak about all unique architecture this way? Certainly! But Frank Gehry has passed and not another moment will become: Frank is like a fabled bird: We might imagine his wings spread/spreading- -the cuddly intellectual in flight: His work is here, there, in all spirits of the mind.

Architect: Frank Gehry: The Louis Vuitton Museum in Paris: The Fondation Louis Vuitton

Architecture of Cities XV: Mapping Beauty

Architect: Santiago Calatrava: Oculus: World Trade Center: New York

Two Worlds as One

I am alone: Effective photography lays paused in a quiet stagnation: There is zero mischief amidst the moment with my five-hundred pound companion. My story linked by evolution and ancestry: The fable begins:

Neverland- -is a near distant world; home to reverie and spirited destinations: We sit with uneven breaths: Arms intertwined- -understandingly passionate: My mere gerth and the Silverbacks’ envelops: we portray the Hula in the guise of a Pas de Deux avec leis- -demonstrate the glamorous ballon afoot- -the un imaginable at play- -My trusted, the one who sees as I: The thunderous six-foot, five- hundred pound silverback cozied near with dreams that rest as one: 

The bench we inhabit sees two jungles: The verdant and fabricated: We as one encapsulate two views- -before and around: Our eyes a mist- -eyes in the mist seeing hundreds of cities: Our jungles as one: Two separate worlds  entangled as one- -One world: Two cultures breathing, entwined by  legacies of our jungle: The thousand memories from a thousand years- -linger: The legacy- -we brace for, lives after: 

Architect: Rafael Moneo: Torre Puig Headquarters and more: Barcelona

Alone not lonely- -an imaginable history experienced in several tenses. Oh to be: I could and maybe It is not me and my Silverback: Maybe it is something simpler: Maybe I do cozy with Manhattan’s Woody Allen and Diane Keaton: Maybe their world view in that finite moment has always been mine; The Queensborough Bridge in view Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” lofting, lilting and enveloping like a tsunami tippy topped with a dozen swans’ silken feathers. I consider one fabulist after another and another: 

Thomas Macaulay plaintively recites;

'Then out spake brave Horatius,/ The Captain of the Gate:/ 'To every man upon this earth/ Death cometh soon or late;/ And how can man die better/ Than facing fearful odds,/ For the ashes of his fathers,/ And the temple of his gods.''

I prefer that I as we, have always seen more than the jungles that are theirs and ours: We two with eyes wide open: Soft feels near:  We dream and remember: The wind at our backs: Two jungles one idea: Our worlds vastly different: We are one nuzzled: Defining histories splayed before our eyes: Behind and ahead- -we as beasts- -eyes enjoined.

“Nightlife” Architects Kohn Pedersen and Fox: One Madison on the left: Architects Cetraruddy on the right: New York City

One Silverback and I navigate the bend in the Elysian river towards a more expansive future: The river’s currents pace our desires: The air plunged out of the solar plexus: Lights flicker in the distance: Waves of said river offer adventures’ previews in unforeseen clarity:

We remain as one in solemn reveries enjoining again and again our hands as two worlds: The natural and fabricated: A visual feast is ours to taste: Hands held- -The mirrored experiences in perfect imaginary time await.

Alone but never lonely I can map cities that wait to entertain my camera: They will be imagine as jungles and adventures: They will be imagined as imaginations on steroids: They will be imagined as fables that may become my true dreams rising to the moment: I address the globe as a destination to live an entire dream in an unforeseen reality: accompanied by Manhattans’ two some or my my Silverback adorning a lei: Look through my lens with my eyes- -and again.

Virgin Hotel NoMad: Architects: Markzeff and Stantec: New York City

Architecture of Cities: Mapping beauty X1V

Architect: Jeanne Gang: Building: Gilder Center for Science, Education, and Innovation: New York

A detail of the collection of images I made

Discovering the Lore: Architectural Theorist

I knew a famous architectural theorist: He wanted to collaborate about the city not yet seen. He wanted to undress the city. He wanted to reveal himself to the city: He wanted secrets: He wanted to be seen and unseen. He didn’t want the The Naked City- - He wanted an investigation. He wanted the simple nakedness that cannot be defined: In a word, he wanted the unfathomable; He wanted my camera to illuminate the pieces of the city that are us. I merely wanted to be a bystander. I wanted to be Watson to his Holmes: The city’s living vibrant architecture awaited.

The true premise- -was “an invitation”> to address the millions- -the real and imagined databases the city’s human collective had to offer: The idea sent me scampering like 10 Br’er Rabbits (mobilizing as one) across not one street nor streets but through dozens of cities: My eyes minted fresh: I moved masterfully through southern’ rainforests like a single Giant Blue Morpho butterfly experiencing a pheromone feverish pitch: I matched the moments of exuberance with mine. Mine eyes colored with mixed and matched reflections of the cities I know- -the cities I knew: Centuries were splayed in sight- -the readied architecture to be ensued. All boundaries were blurred: I imagined mending the gap:  My gaze became a stacked focus into ultra clarity: My mind sped in speeds not yet experienced: My feet lagged closely behind: I was living in layers of unforeseen dimensions - -aglow would be a Kurosawa life_ _drenched in multiple color densities- -histories’ stories and Japan at my feet with story(s) to tell:  I am merely traveling fast.

The lore, the lore of cities, mankind’s lore- -A tapestry of global savannahs presented as protectorates against the oncoming erector sets- - Our city’s cities rising as A.C. Gilbert intended: The toy boxes live (in real time) with us as we breathe.

Architects: SHoP: Building: American Copper: New York City

I stand near the immediacy of a collision: Taller than tall we peer above and upwards at the city’s city: Together I am marking time and the camera’s geography: One day or ten centuries from now I gather the same will matter- -My device my visual conscience hears the heightened panic: I race, I freeze frame: What remains and what will always be is the steely romance that is my photography’s dreamscape; The cities await.

The lioness returns: Eyes espy the brilliance and the miasma …the wildebeest with drool to spare awaits the finale and what may follow. Eyes widen beyond known palates of continents and city’s spectral splayed before our billions.

The project was never consummated: What materialized: What reigns in my mind: The  energy the idea became: Almost thirty years ago a passionate meaningless conversation became affixed to my vision as time passed: I allowed the eyes to follow with reckless velocity- -a race that continues:

 I barely concentrate on one city, while hundreds more vie for the camera’s eyes.

Architect: Ricardo Bofill: Interior of his home and office: La Fábrica: Barcelona, Spain

I am a gatherer: The manifestation of cause and effect. I dig. Captures large and small abound. The Fairy Feather thread of an idea woven into histories mine and others: A tapestry’s textiles made from devotion: It mirrors the city(s) building(s): Bricks,mortar and stones- -a plethora of man made  naturals: A new type of tapestry imagined.

I no longer exhale: Teared with wistful dreams- - afoot the nagging joy on roads taken carries: Like Tolkiens’ mind’s eyes, I imagined steps near. The relentless consciousness of my past and future, I dance- -and again: Whispering voices remain reminded: The reflective reflections measure my time- -the universes’ time. 

Picasso sought to imitate Raphael it is said: I have no names nor faces behind or in front- -yet. I have a tool that plays into the plan from yesterday and utilized possibly tomorrow> My camera>Atop my blue whale I seek a bit more. The end is near: Then there.

Architect: Toyo Ito: Tod’s Headquarters in Tokyo, Japan

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty X111

The Verizon Building: Architects Kahn and Jacob

Buildings live and die:

What we say and unsay in the ashes of remorse- -The  ashes appear naked within the phoenix’s rising pose: Is there something better. The idea of Pompeii: A city immersed in lava with nothing but a few colorful petals wisping in the wind. A flower naked for centuries: The stifling breath almost exhumed from near death is what remains. Nature’s history of light arises with our eyes most everyday: The history of light in nature measures equally the sky bright the sky we see that may matter.

I stood in front of an architectural idea: The Taj Mahal: It is one of many structures that history leads our eyes: I have stranded my eyes in front of possibly  ten-thousand places home to architecture’s history: Just possibly I have seen more than most less than some as the saying portends. The funny part is that what I have seen matters less than how my camera’s lens and accompanying lenses see moments today and tomorrow: The architecture my eyes have seen bare witness- -witness to a marriage of histories spoken- -histories dreamed.

Architect Frank Gehry’s Spruce St in Gold

A photographer I know emphasized  that the lens “knows”. The lens is not what we all know: It is a tool made: It’s codes are almost encrypted: The lenses made in mind for man: Before AI- - there was/is the imagination. 

Photography’s history is certainly a known entity: The lock of his/her time is heard when the mechanical shutter collapses in speeds almost akin to skinning vegetable and fruit varietals: More than many archaeologists, paleontologist and anthropologists write about, man and mankind are too a varietal The secret marriage between math and science is a camera lens’ passionate possessive secret: It is about a beast: Imagine the heart’s eyes are what fully execute an image: 

The possibilities for how we see what we think what we know is as an astrophysicist’ proclamation: The world ahead: The stars we have not yet discovered- -the stars we have not yet met: The magnification of time in dreams yet to be met are visible fractures: The time seen in our eyes, have not yet entertained the numerous calibrations yet to be introduced to the numerous equations that make up a single idea, a single print: The exposure’s light and man’s eyes have not yet met the entire known elements of science in our present.

NYU Paulson Center: Architects: Davis, Brody and Bond and Kieran Timberlake

A.I technology has not yet rubiked all life’s information into a single idea: The photography of architecture has yet to be seen in its entirety: The magnification of dreams awaits: We will capture dimensions not known in the sciences: Science fiction is waiting: Our minds eyes will be enrapt for generations. When the moment arrives the story’s dream begins.

The bend in the river, awaits. The automaton that is photography has yet to expose to everything we need to know: There are codes that are withheld in our living moments: Too often we as photographers are like squawking Myna birds: So easy to repeat history and call it a future: As every astrophysicist’s lecture would proclaim- -“the new is ahead”.

I readily confess as we must that the voice inside is the greatest visual companion: The joy of photography’s complicated process: The light of each day, the chemical imbalance of every stir of a pool of print making devices; The temperatures varying in fractions  and degrees not yet encountered: The paper’s emulsions and densities and the nature of how we process the way a photograph needs to be seen? Each photograph imagine- -from the history of the very first exposed experience until this very tick of a clock should affect the nature of how we see the shades of shadows and the breath living on marble and stone in every possible facet living in the life of buildings.

Madison Belmont Building: Architects: Warren and Wetmore

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty X2

Architect Fernando Romero: Mexico City: Museo Soumaya

The Math and Freud

The likeness in the mirror is often a common dwarf mongoose: I appear lazily inattentive: From a titled sentinel position  I consider the window of fractured moments before my eyes. I am not on duty to fend against the enemy- -I am reviewing the (troops) light before darkness; light after dark: Larger than the planet itself there is a single moment hidden among the refracted prisms- -not a shadow nor shard of light escapes my camera’s eye.

The nature of me becomes akin to “walking in beauty”, the gait with certainty- -the pleasures that  my captures provide and evidence of the life in the rear view.

There is a lunacy in me: Chaplin like silly- - at best: an infancy that remains a bit before I rise in the morn and eyes shut in the night: Eyes awaken, eyes wide shut I imagine the sight upon the first moments- -the first sight: The first gasp: My first site: 

Architect: Rem Koolhaas: Rothschild&CO. Headquarters: New Court: London, England

I often play my life in rewind mode: I pause on occasions to learn from the captured investigations- - Nestled somewhere on earth desires are equally met and not met: Elevated passions prey upon my dreams. Inspirations mine adventures- -adventures mine inspirations. They are bookmarks from days before that challenged my visual worlds old and new, new and old: The heart makes the world matter- -The matter of the heart lifts us.

I humbly  describe my experiences- -each syllable is merely a fighting moment: I have stared down the presence of just about every building (like a wildebeest eyed by a lioness) with a locked and loaded camera. I never know what will be- -

The gasp that cannot be heard: The  slight adjust of a lapel on a coat a hem on a skirt or two inch cuffs on men’s slacks- -A child’s guffaw in ear distance- -brick/mortar and more spoke to why the lens should caress! The eyes have it, I imagine.

A modest realm of photography I live in- -enthralled by what the world had to offer- -Yet to offer: Each day comes down to 1/30th or 1/60th of a second: Quietly the camera is supposed to snap- -if a moment is heard- - the minute, the hour, the day my entire life will be framed in a holding pattern- -within a shutter-release. The world is there. I analyze beyond necessity- -Sigmund Freud or another might lend a hand in the direction of the couch.

Architect: Kengo Kuma: Tokyo, Japan: Sunny Hills

I look at everything from the first photo the first architecture- - I stand in position for mathematical fractions- -I measure my life and dreams in fractions. The fraction when the camera snaps; Freud or another offers another session on the couch: I evaluate what matters- -I evaluate what matters again and again. I wait for an explanation and again. I explain that I see in fractions- -moments await.

The interminable Illusion is where the joy of my photography lives: The past and present are measured from iota to largesse: My mind makes the most from extremes: Something shifts: It is the math- -The lens makes a calculation, and another. Freud or another welcomes me back to the couch again: I explain the need for a conquest: It is a minor blip on the screen never to be like the epic Greeks’ or others or another: my breathing pauses: A camera’s conquest is out of reach: Something in mine eyes is always worth, truly worth waiting for- -I wait again: I measure  the shutter and apertures: Madness prevails- -mad math is what it is- - 1/30th or more: I am determined to lean into all of the buildings, edifices and designs- -that are my days.

I emphasize the need to gasp- - the sound that indicates my camera has arrived: The welcome eyes of the lioness staring down the wildebeest is an admission difficult to utter: It indicates I am locked in with a capture near: I dance. I dance again like an elfin Charlie Chaplin. Freud and others may suggest lunacy.

Architect: Gordon Bunshaft: SOM: 28Liberty Street, New York, New York

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty X1

The New Museum: Architect SANAA: New York City:I raced north and south on Bowery to see this

The Anticipation of Memory:

My friend sat on the lap of Igor Stravinsky, the lap of her great uncle, Igor Stravinsky.

My mind bellowed like a beggar to know of the near breath- -would the music icon become an inspiration, an inspiration to be great: Nobody is certain that greatness can be inhaled.

Young and youthful is almost always something more than we know- -something more than a mere memory- -something more than a snapshot: I archive those memories, in the history of others- -the inside of my eyes.

I remember I saw a library: I was a youthful boy, a young boy as it were. The facade of the library was a lure. What might I see inside the facade. What might be. The rumors are remembered as anticipations: Stories and tribal dances were often heard just before- -what may be near- -what is inside. Entering past columns and doors I was infused with a drug not known- -anticipation is its name: The appearance of the wild that is our wilderness was the most beautiful I had ever seen: The library: The library that seemed adorned with towering palm trees- -but intimately intimate. The  memories exposed to the rarified air hidden, I cannot remember. Realities imagine all sorts of memories, I imagine: 

“Action” is hollered. A comedic/drama is staged to be set across expected landscapes: It occurs to be a scavenging for an Antoine de Saint-Exupéry docudrama. The photographs begin to dream: I look and imagine the anticipation- - the players move into position.

“Snap” breathes the director.

Mercedes Museum: Stuttgart Germany: Architect Ben Van Berkel: UN Studio: I waited for three days for the rain to stop and the architect suggested the rainbow was luck

The anticipation of days ahead become the moments. A new contemporary library was built: the replacement shattered in staggering fashion my dreams; Admiration for a particular past was crushed…I never visited again- -that library.

The eternity that became decades long career reminds me of choices had and choices ahead: It is that often told story about a negotiation in fiction: Forever true: I made a deal. It seemed to be quasi Bergman’s ,The Seventh Seal, and Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale: I made a bid for extra time on earth: I made a bid to sell the soul for better art; I imagined. My mind in constant rewind plays in repeat mode: Repeatedly listening to  Heart’s Kennedy Center version of Stairway to Heaven; Stravinsky’s Firebird: They are modes of intimate and distant inspirations; A roll of the dice: What may I anticipate: What will the memory be: I repeat the the act of baying into the winds: I beg to  anticipate with every “Snake eyes”- -I must roll again.

The Sculpture Gallery: One of my favorite interior spaces: Philip Johnson designed this for the shadows I love: Philip walked into my light

Wispily vanishing are my stories about memories. My shutter as in a camera’s “shutter release” opens and closes doors as in Huxley’s Doors of Perception: Never hallucinogenic, just mere days with minutes passing before all of our eyes: The realities move so astonishingly, I need to see the anticipation before I hear the camera’s snap.

The citadel is the first station on the line to….: From atop and within I remember the constraints to know what is mine to capture: City to city, the difference is becoming acquainted to the navigational pull to the nature of the governing light- -I anticipate from all sides all moments: I wish it was a proper opera but mostly a quagmire within an asylum: The incursions into cities is infinitely more than pleasure- -I must make the photographs that I imagine; Moments of anticipation in fact become…I may need to climb back to the inner walls and consider the frames of cities. Where else can my camera challenge the rollicking world that some site photography.

The American Folk Art Museum: Architect Billie Tsien and Tod Williams: May be their best exterior design: I literally stopped traffic so I could capture this angle: Nobody stops traffic the way I do: The museum no longer exists

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty X

Architect Cesar Pelli: His Design Center three whales: Red, Green, Blue: Los Angeles

The Portraits of Seeing and Listening 

“Hello”, is how more than a few thousand days began: A few of those days became odysseys like the great imaginary kind…but different:

Every beginning has a moment. I would walk with- - Oscar Niemeyer, Zaha Hadid, Philip Johnson, Arata Isozaki, Jacques Herzog and more: They only, known to me- -would share a way of seeing their ideas their works: Those moments became Indelible words stamped atop my eyes like architectural footprints: Indelible stamps of approval; The evidence of time shared remains as a whistling collective of visions.

The “Hello” was and is the only word that mattered. It is a place where the light comes from- -once spoken not another word need be shared: In the back story to the above mentioned- -The feeling of a minute translates into innumerable dreams of fantasy’s appearing in real time.

The memories of those particular days have a lot to say about how my eyes see today: The paths drawn and suggestive journeys threw my mind into affective whiplashes: Flashes of joy and discoveries blended and formulated in each accelerated and decelerated dreamscape: Years of prying open destinations and wishing for ideas:- -My memories dance enjoined like - -jazz on steroids: Stirred and spurred by “Trane”, Miles, Dizzy and a bit of Gato.

New York: My camera seemed to sketch a few shadows amidst the elegance of the city

Today’s days seem almost sedate by comparison: The inanimate architecture that animates my days seems lavished with an unknown serum with provocative properties:  My mind absorbs what little it can- -Ten-thousand words wave in the distance for me to join- -and engage my posturing architectural encounter. The moments ahead and behind are expressions stowed for safe keeping and to be counted on in another time: 

Imagine the inherent value of ideas living in Dublin’s Trinity College Library; The Royal Portuguese Cabinet of Reading in Rio de Janeiro; My own Library of Congress and other archival treasures of mankind: Think- -my imaginary swapping of ideas and stories within the greatest known depositories: Then blink a few times: Peek at my humble card catalog, Rolodex or imaginary spindle churning, turning ephemeral spaces not on an atmospheric cloud  but space’s computing cloud.

My world resides in the aftermath of ”Hello”. The supernatural becomes me- -became me, my platform: The magic of dreaming became my reality: “Hello” is not a word- -it is the path: 

Imagine Homer’ Odysseus: He began his trek home with Hello: He espied his wife Penelope with the eyes tearing: Aghast- -he utters to himself, “hello”: Carrie in Horton Footes’ Trip to Bountiful,  said goodbye to her past with the gleeful eye bellowing “Hello”. The Steinbeck Joad Family began their journey atop the overcrowded truck with a silent chorus in mind singing “Hello”. The journeys ahead and the journeys remembered equate with undeniable grit and hope: 

I have ushered in the word hello my entire career: The directions are, as they were, indifferent to what may befall: Hello had to be urged and so I went: Simply an odyssey of sorts was near at hand.

Architects OMA in the Foreground and KPF standing just behind: New York elegant blue shades

Simply by dreaming I measured distances in my minds eyes. The dreams are  what elongates my sextant made from one million army of toy Gumby’s: It is what illuminates my guided days between and from destinations A-Z. The alchemists who provided my first encounter>my first sight>were seer’s who carried architecture’s aforementioned words from my walks with voices: The embrace that ensued my days and decades in remembrance startles the heart. 

The bellowing whispered gasp is heard as I cross cities for conquest: Nothing regal in mind, mere fulfilling the enjoyment of discovery: Hello is heard at every corner. New York, Tokyo, Copenhagen, Seville, Dhaka, London and … My eyes are stamped with what follows “Hello”- -the journey across cities just for a single snap.

In the garden that is photography, from city to city I have so little to accomplish: I only before I die want to make one Ansel Adams Moonrise, Hernandez and one Roger Fenton’ The Queens’ Target.

They are very simple requests from a photographer who merely wants to waken his world everyday with “Hello”.

If I could capture one image that might be lost forever before the light vanishes: If I could capture one image that might have been forgotten by history- - I might dance naked again atop the whale’s of our Seven Seas.

Seville, Spains: Shades and colors minutes before the sun sits

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty 9

Fulton Street view of World Trade Center: New York City

“Come a little closer

 Hear what I have to say,“

“When we were strangers

I watched you from afar,” 

Neil Young

A Diamond to Touch: The intersection of seeing and touching a moment:

I stand alone: My mind inside my eyes: Camera in hand; I dance; I dance something differently; I mimic a bit of the old “soft shoe”- - not Astaire, more Chaplin with a lilt in my gait: The moment is happily zany: I defeat life’s heinous nightmares: I listen beyond the moment: The city awaits: 

I wander: My mind wanders: I pace down alleyways, darkened streets and across prairie lands: There is always a better view: So many people, so many animals, so much natural life and never enough:

Photography is more than a moment: Photography is sort of an amber shade of nirvana: Nirvana is merely an extreme destination to re-invent a comfort factor: a pillowed fusion where I can see as much as I need to rest my eyes: The city awaits.

I bend from a great height to something less below; The pose textured like a euphoric hallucinogenic. Imagine moving to pet a black panther- - or bend to kiss a rose. Fangs and thorns will never appear- -euphoria remains: Reality raises its eyes: Architecture enjoins both reality and euphoria- -The visual experience tactility remains: The touch; stones, metals and more become a tactile textured memory in my hands:

St. Louis CemeteryNo.1: New Orleans

Sometimes I am like a starving raptor standing alone, anticipating a near to be - - capture: Today I am begging to imagine a tomorrow, find a new gear to advance the identity in my pictures: “What does the Hope Diamond feel like”. If I cannot feel, I can dream. Geerat Vermeij, the blind evolutionary biologist, (whom I have photographed) taught me that: He educated and reminded me that as he once stood on the shore of a new found coastline- - almost anything he could imagine, may be real.

Those who can not get close but insert their eyes into the materials of beauty are a rare breed: To be transported through time by the simplicity of a caressing a new found object of beauty? I can just about hear Keats: “Ode…”: I imagine what the experience must make for the photograph about to be… I with a bit of a wisp in hand touch not Egypt, Brazil and continents- - I touch what Vasari may have written about- -the materials that Brunelleschi, da Vinci, and later Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer summoned towards their destiny’s.

Interior Art: Museum of Modern Art

My 365 days begin with innate visual understanding,  imagine my camera sees. Massive illusions pose and posture in my cities: The photographs about to be realized- -shape shift before I see what I beg to touch:

My days begin and end with camera in tow:  The high bar is seen raised daily possibly because of a man named- - Marcel Proust . “In Search of Lost Time” or “Remembrance of Things Past”, whichever you prefer has always compelled or forced (whichever you prefer) to guide my eyes to more than I can fathomly see: I round the cities on all sorts of wheels hoping to either see more or merely stand before: I am equally calm and pleading: 

I make a photograph today to share tomorrow- -tomorrow I share the photograph about my yesterday: My past was …: If you may imagine- - has seen decades, centuries and millenniums. They are not mine, but… partially Proust’s. They are frames from what remains- -my days and before: They are my illogical life and  death …I try to search for new and remember old frames from when…Every frame I have captured is uniquely hinged to a beautiful daily demise, but mine.

A unique mix and match of three London textures center weighted by Architect Renzo Piano’s “The Shard”

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty 8

Architect: Christian Portzamparc: ONE 57

Walt Disney’s The Wonderful World of Color- -comes to mind:

RabelaisIan worlds explode upon contact like a supernova inviting intimate lovers and expansive dream makers to seek the great divide: I see the reflections beyond buildings, cities, continents and more: I am transported to the mingling of numbers on a page: 118 elements that are us. 

Photography measures the distance between where you stand, what you see and where you dream…math and science become elixirs: The necessity for experiments and numbers to matter: To map the ages of time before the narrow light of the day vanishes: That is photography: That is the world ahead and beyond.

I see the migration of incongruent colors: My eyes rest: Artists’ Vermeer, Hopper, DaVinci or the ultramarine Yves Klein canvases flaming into deep furnaces: The expectation is akin to waiting for the atom to split and make brilliance in the sky: It is the manner I always intend to see my captures- -the way I hope to see: My aspirations are amusing but live…

The history of glass can be seen in architectures’ evolution: It is a marriage to nature: Photography has captured it in fractured moments: It is like imagining a few grams of mercury spilling like laughing balls from thermometers atop a granite floor like the Mojave Desert’s dazzling sands piercing into the infinite skies. Then consider the 118 members of the permanent Periodic table: Is it possible that the entire 118 matter? I might need 100,000 less the 500 words I share here to explain:

Barcelona: Architect Enric Miralles and Benedetta Tagliaube:

Let’s start from middle earth to the million corners of the earth: Glass has become part of an architectural revolution: Silica Sand, Oxygen, Sodium, Calcium have always inhabited a space on the planet: They all seem to dance with whispering whistles: It becomes a child’s game, “Telephone”: Things heard become, things never dreamed: Things seen become dreams’ realities.

The entire planet from the Sahara to the Amazon; the Congo to the Dolomites; resting under a waterfall, to the closest rush of molten lava; Colorado mountains to almost everywhere the earths’ geological  formations  have lived for millenniums: My dreams becoming realities are quite new,quite rhapsodic. My dreams migrate across continents: I stand from the corners of the earth to middle earth: I stand in one square corner of all  parcels of land: A vibration of vascular connections are heard every moment I breathe: 

Photography’s marriage of science and math are relived each day: The dressed nakedness that is nature is witnessed in every frame my days are here- - My fly fishing  lure is in view: A rivers’  reflections are rippled with life below: I splash as if excavating; I pull the water’s movements apart; I see my photographer’s beginnings: Members of the “118”; reside below the known levels of the river bed:

Architect : UN Studio: Ben Van Berkel: London

The reflections in architecture are in the end like the most organic natural beauties and music compositions with well placed crescendos: A towering edifice or wee little homes on the prairies read the same in my eyes: I catch a glimpse of the built space broadly- - boldly escaping into the skies- -: Then vanishing into the light of another angle: The enigmatic rides behind, below, and ahead: I see the loneliness and excitement of a story to be told: I hear the reflections telling stories about the untold city. The reflections casting personalities across the streets and the landscapes: The table of  elements are seen within: The glass is history: I am standing in history: Before me there was another… I have built the canvases for my cameras to breathe when they are running in a dream: The breath is seen neither as art, science nor math. But the history; All that remains is the history that once was.

The Empire State Building: New York City

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty 7

Everyone talking to each other: Design in contrast

The invented Eyries:

If I could imagine Darwinian adventures- -and Darwin’s minds’ eyes- -Then just possibly all of his discovered genetic unions across centuries would meld into what my photographs can be: I would conjure for thought- - climbing atop the highest medieval Eyrie’ home to the gigantic of anything feathered: So soft it might be wrapped around my body as well as my mind: I would muster all of what is my cognitive strength; from earth below and above I might imagine a gathering of bird’s eye views: Atop the highest elevations there are many ways to begin the flight: Hovering above capitals mingled among continents; I might discover the beauty of my reflections while my dreams are mapping known realities: Without notice nor alarm- -I might plunge into depths not seen: Once in flight with bomb bay doors slightly ajar enjoining descent and ascent: Pictured are color prismatic fragments appearing as a single frame in a winter inhale: Windsor lights toil near the trumpets of cannons of LED lights; It is never a choice: The darkness is for imaginations.The light is for the days ahead. If only I might map all of the known cities of continents and beauty before my eyes.

Miami: Everyone talking to each other: Design on steroids

Flight and sound appear as shapes of things enjoined: Sounds in tow, the shadowy mists of their shapes have traveled as companionship nipping on five continents. The sizable enterprise of my captures might matter in millenniums after me: 

The technology I utilize for visualization mates my mind to my heart: My eyes hear my mind, ambling secretly- -above and around city streets: It has become a decree for living- -the design of architecture and all that ensues- -are and will be my muse: My photography is seen sifting through atmospheres known and unknown: Dreams built from realities not yet seen: Then I make tomorrow another intended beauty with the hope that another sees not what I see but how…

I often feel like an artist discovering a new intention: Picasso childlike drawings delighted him to no specific end:  A black panther cub’s eyes remain closed for weeks or months: The eyeing of life following days and months of sound and scent begin to have meaning on that first day of sight: Picasso assumingely danced with glee, the cub seemingly danced with wonderment: Both worlds in language only appear titled Briefing for a Descent into Hell: Maybe I am considering Doris Lessing’s version or maybe the unknown awakening to the real world: The surprise that is ahead but not known.

Seville, Spain: Bioclimatic Sphere

If jumping from unknown heights was in my blood, maybe I might understand the artists and the feline’s first steps into unchartered territory: From the Eyries there exists a perspective not fully understood by most> It is not the plunge nor the deep dive that attracts me- -It is the revelation of a new perspective that belongs to me in the moment: There never has been a defining perspective for me nor my cameras> I certainly do not believe in the best suited or best this nor that.

An entire world awakens: The planets feathered genus are my eyes and ears in a duel: Am I flightless - - maybe: There is brilliance in the idea of flight: In my space and time there are no boundaries- - only the  perspectives on How to see. 

Appropriately surreal, my life is not mine- -The entitlement belongs to my camera. The legacies’ of architecture has been living before me: Let us see… Nothing is fait accompli.

New York Twilight: A dialogue between many buildings in the golden light atop Hudson Yards