Architecture of Cities: Communing with Architecture

St Vartans Armenian Cathedral: New York City

I have never been able to escape the elfin collective who tag aside as I pursue the youthful exuberance for snagging my captures: I often feel more Kim in Kipling than Peter Pan in Barrie: Adventure’s in my paradise is a camera navigating fantasies in fiction: I desire a plethora of fiction living in my fantasies: Anthropologists, e.g., (Leakeys’, Meads’ and Goodalls’) congregate in my tiny cerebrum; They abide by alertly, and surprisingly navigating my skill-sets: Introducing my camera eyes to nature’s natural artifacts: The history of us all lives in the architecture that remains: All of the stories claimed and reclaimed over time are mine to snap: The buildings alone are not mere legos: They are stories that accompany our histories: Freeze-framed in architectural footprints, buildings are ready for their close-ups:- -My lens becomes us.  

Eli Attia: Architect: New York City

Alone- -I imagine edifices posing in abundance: My camera orchestrates my sights. My camera prefers the fiction that is nearer to reality: The intricacy of tissues webbed to my neurons’ engines that power my eyes remind me: I am reminded of another life making portraits: Standing before the fixed lens are living examples of what came before me: What will lead me ahead: The voices begin looking back in time: The new voices try to define what tomorrow will hold: Aged impressions of lives lived- -The youthful promises for what may become:

Antoni Gaudi: Detail from Sagrada Famalia Barcelona

Antoni Gaudi’s Sagrada Famalia’s  unearthly design poses like an old man: It stands having seen: It stands remembering the past: Restored it is moving forward with the past trailing: We have “two-stepped” many times: The melding of my first views; like seeing an embryo at first glance: The restoration so many years later- - and then- - Realizing the division of time enraptured by a single shadow in a frame: The entirety of the brilliant for me was a voluminous shadow: I remembered my first encounter: I gleefully remember the recent encounter: Realizing simplicity conquers all in photography: I breathlessly allowed the film see: Everyone and everything living across generations in minute detail is an anthropologists gasping discovery: Halted breath, eyes a glow revelation: Then and mostly, the origins of us like growth rings tell the story like two boxers in a ring: Statistics separate the aged from what we might see as the “Sweet bird of youth”. Tired and proud structures spread across continents like kernels of sustenance reminding us of our stories: The precious time on this planet is mostly fleeting before our eyes: Both ideas are manifested in two types of pictures I capture in cities:The generational urban and rural acclaims are simple: Who we are and who we were. Gaudi’s intimate shadow awakens.

From the first afternoon I walked under/through the California Redwood Chandelier Tree- -I knew. I remember communing as if the tree was my very first anthropomorphic encounter: The shadows and the vertical cavernous cavity introduced me to my futures: Communing with architecture is about conversations with architectural friend and foe: Architecture is unique to the moment: It is not as Dylan Thomas referred to Christmas snow: “It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas.”

Architecture is not merely architecture in one city or another- - it is a manner of communing with the history of self and the histories prior to me and forward forever after.

Architect: Diller/Scofidio/Renfro: 15 Hudson Yards: New York City

Architecture of Cities: A Story

A Temple turned to rubble: 58-60 Rivington Street: The former oldest Temple in New York

The unnerving quietude in mystery—September 11th, 2001 hosted a brilliant morning light,--, a brilliant sky. Quiet went on alert: Quiet is when your pets perked ears are like sirens not heard: Quiet is a place where my dreams live: Quiet is a perception of reality about to be heard: Quiet is an overture to all of my tomorrows: Every morning seems the same: I wake up: I check my calendar: A bit of coffee: Something arranged for the day(s). I try to  capture something three-hundred and sixty-five days a year: A volcanic interruption is all that might interrupt the flow:

The walls were not moving: Traffic seemed still: Something was too quiet: I tuned into my television: I saw the second plane hit the World Trade Center: The noise that followed was silent: The noise was never real:

I gathered my camera on my balcony: I kept looking down to the streets as I did when I first skydived: The balcony was not falling: I landed onto my streets: I walked towards the smoke: I could barely make out street signs: I walked until my lungs knew better. The streets lead me to the silent site:

WTC: What became after 9/11

I returned home: Freeze framed the soul:

I stood into the evening darkness leaning into my balcony window: I watched assorted vehicles with windows shrouded in black drive past: My imagination challenged: I knew but imagined  bodies  in those windows: The transportation never stopped: I never moved: I never blinked: The last and final gaze saw a yellow school bus- -

My camera never moved: The purpose of framing horror could not be framed in my mind: Maybe minutes or hours passed- -certainly days: Now it is shy of twenty-four years and I can reprint the image across my eyes faster than a Red-tailed Comet hummingbird flaps its wings: The haunting lives: The capture remains in my mind’s time- -every breath that whispers.

Time passed: Architect Richard Meier included me in the al corrente collective: Eisenman, Gwathmey, Holl, Vinoly, Isozaki, Schwartz, Diller, Scofidio, Tod Williams and the New York Times Architecture critic/organizer-Herbert Muschamp. More groups and gatherings would later include Shigeru Ban, Ken Smith, Libeskind, Foster, Childs: 

I snapped most of the teams in their search for plans and progress: I returned daily to capture the planning stages as if a military strategic war room was secretly deciding our nations future: I was invited to record the captures of the participants planning: I was a pretty large fly on the wall that nobody paid attention to: The universe seemed to expand into a congregation of like minded and not so like minded participants: I was reminded of Raymond Burr coordinating the attack on Godzilla: The best and brightest gathered to counter the catastrophe:

Most photographers keep an elfin influence somewhere atop their shoulders: Close enough to whisper inspirations into their ears: I almost always had American Civil War photographer Mathew Brady near: He choreographed so many captures not merely for the times: He made images he thought society might want to see this day in twenty-twenty-five and the almost  one-hundred and fifty years from his initial captures:

The tallest residential Building in New York City by SHOP

The very  day I encountered the “site I claimed the tragedy of the grotesque: I will remember it always: The days that impacted my camera’s eyes never truly remember, but do: I play every scene from my initial captures to include my nightmares and horrors that others have lived:

I have replayed the anthem  my camera has undertaken: It begins with an audible from the metronome in my ears: The yellow school bus passes in my every nightmare: I imagine I begin to a period of adjustment: I stand from this street and that corner with a promise, promised: I will record as in my elfin Mathew Brady- -From my initial capture until there is no more- - cities and more will become captures for not this day but those tomorrow:

As if accompanied by an army of hazel-eyed irises: The woodwinds gather: El-CID as in cinema’s Charlton Heston’s plays before my eyes: Miles Davis as in Miles Davis plays to the march: The Gabriel Garcia Marquez Tramontana melds with nature’s Aurora borealis: The  accompaniment of inspirations challenge the lens to see the cities as I might imagine them- -and as I need to expose the streets beyond a mere today.

Christian Portzamparc’s One57

Architecture of Cities: Ensemble of Names Proliferate Over Time

Architect Eric Parry: London

I remember in my life exactly where I realized the repose: I turned slightly one  morning: My room had some Edward Hopper details: I stood where Hopper might have… I saw someone else’s world: It was mine: It was new to me forever: Then I gazed some more: This city for my second time was also the first time I remember talking to myself about photography: Photography-I had not seen: 

One memorable moment was here alone with me in this city: I walked beyond the alone with my eyes peering into decades behind and ahead: 

There was a cafe; A secret hideaway I sat: Daily I watched Rod Serling toss time forwards and backwards: The entire time of a day eclipsed dreams to be had:  Presence and experience was (and still, possibly) my light: I awakened  to see myself through history that will become or has been before me: The light in my mind or others must have a beginning: The mother’s womb comes to mind: I imagine this possibility everyday: “Snap”. So a new day begins.

Arnold Böcklin‘s “Isle of the Dead” comes to mind often: Viewed from afar and viewed as if within {pause} it is a quiet place: Serene ripplets cross ample immensity of a secretive waterway: Serenity offered: Something portent: The end game is near: Peaceful expectations vanish: torrents of desires  approach: I seize architecture; I seize the streets; I seize the cities; I interpret cities; I interpret the streets; I interpret architecture: Cultures remain captured in my frames: The camera spins atop an unfettered ball bearing {pause} aimless and equally engaged: I am rewarded by the experience and the surprises that land in my focus:

Strata: Architect BFLS: Elephant and Castle: Brookfiels Developers; London

The structure of cultures: The structure of cities and streets are captured in freeze frame: My first and every city invites me to collaborate my lights and colors with experiences to be seen: I am immeasurably unleashed with equal trepidation and fierce desires to secure photos of destinations: The assembled components appear: I snap: The waywardness in me is destined: The depth of the infinite experience in a single frame is what defines dignity in not a career but a life worth seeing:

Time is stretched out like an intimate canvas across decades: Celluloid and digital captures only become enviable when photography’s plasticity affords me something more.

An ensemble of cities in pictures: Paramount in my time are experiences: The surface of my archival pages indicates many thousands of names and places: The entire collective of decades is something dear: 

A bridge to cross along the Thames

Dangers and entertainment alone in one place: The park-shadows frightened: Smoke seen from the roadside: A meal skewered over a fire: Riveting history I have not seen: Thousands collide and dance in shadows past as I inch my way to make  new captures: I need not escape the shadows or the histories: They are in many ways why I am here to make photographs: Again and again to capture: The city, the country or continent I replicate my steps to be certain: I repeat my steps to improve my points of view:

Crowds bring mysteries: Mysteries are heightened by noises and the anticipation of what is near: Traffic stops: Strips of streets meld into excitement and something new: Jack The Ripper came to mind: Confessions of an Opium Eater came to mind: The realist in me prevails: Wild photograph  fantasies fade from memory: Truth in photography is my raison d’être:

Andre Kertesz photograph of his brother exiting the glare from a single street light is the simplest template to live by: I have seen that image one million times not in my dreams but in each passage to a new place through a new passage of time: it is there for and to become my balm: To tell me to breathe with the lone intention of the single frame{pause} my capture: Follow the light no matter how bright how dim: It will lead to a place: The place not often of your choosing but anew:

The ensemble of so many names and places are reminders of my years in the streets of cities: In and around the architecture of cities: Gratifyingly listening to stories about cities, places and architecture; My camera may tell stories: The buildings in my scope by Oscar, Thom, Zaha, Frank, Renzo, and …. I have spoken to{pause{ in my own language in my own time with my own meaning.

Thomas Heatherwick: Vinoly and Foster: London

Architecture of Cities: Starlings in Flight:

Fifth Avenue Apple Store: General Motors Building :Grand Army Plaza

I begin each day with a hint of emotional blindness: The deafening quietude of noise calms the purpose ahead: I often imagine patrolling the streets my camera needs to see: Sightless heart, ears in quiet whispers: A day begins to become(…).

The Starling’s murmurations are seen awakening in flight near the night: Unequivocal noises step forward: The early night listens to a unity of trees rustling and water flowing: Silence is clear-I stepforward:

Starlings by the thousands and maybe millions contort, rhythmically in my skies: Beyond the above there is more: An imagined psalm read by a chorus: My eyes vanish within, and reappear. 

My Starlings posing en masse, and across the skies: I seek to frame the Starlings patterns as moving frames: Starlings waiting, frighteningly like a midnight prayer: I awaken with each fluttering movements moment until again I sleep:

Chrysler Building New York City

Inconceivable patterns of flight: The birds dance frozen in frame: The spectral of one million colored transparencies with indelible resolution mimic the Starlings skying patterns: My captures my frames now seen as Starlings in flight: The entirety of an entire career: Starlings evolving freeze framed morphing  in real time: My life in images-if only for me: 

The lone SLR camera accompanied by my murmurings and Starlings through my time and history(…) contorted to see: Colors heard in every direction: Imagine my everyday in flight; like a picture posed, and collected like Starlings in flight: My life in a mirror (…)like Starling’s murmurations.

Ten thousand dreams appear: A naked elephant remembers listening before sex: A naked Mynah bird always talks up a storm before sex: My dreams: My ghosts: My life in pictures.

Architect: Fumihiko Maki: New York City Building: 51 Astor Place

I hear voices from portraits past: Most have died some are still heard: Generations transformed into Christmas Carol’ like ghosts: The ghosts soar and contort among the colored millimeters of Starlings frozen in my imagined sky: Exposed in singular frames among millions my eyes dance with images mimicking birds in flight:

I walk the streets nomadically, but grounded in moments-past and tomorrow.

If I was a Starling in flight or frozen in time and place what would I see while soaring sprightly amidst murmurations: Flying impossibly ladened in stone: Flying fleet with wings just above the streets.

I navigate towards obstacles, differences and memory dementia: Mere overcoming becomes victorious: I beg: I beg to capture; capture the entreating streets: Buildings that present themselves front and center: Buildings that hide in corridors: Secrets and more are my captures: My eyes frame the reveal and the tempered absolutes: 

Moments imagined with “ifs” you were me: I observe with joy and horror the dark energy of space thrusting through all known galaxies: A capture in the making is heard: The galaxy’s, thrust or the lyrical sky dance: I am hurriedly hurling across avenues: Slow tense focus: I explore what is left of my memory: The lights of days, the lights of nights and what will  be reimagined in my mind:The lyrical Starlings murmurations abound in flight; My entire life in pictures contorted in my skies.

New York City 8th Avenue looking South

Architecture of Cities: Vanilla Sky

London: Architects: Richard Rogers “Lloyds…” and Norman Foster: Gherkin and more

The romance of being a photographer has vanished: Today and every day I say hello to my hundreds of thousands: They are my DNA-pause-friendships in celluloid and more: It is a kiss to my past and tomorrow: I identify real places in real times: I dream again. 

I do not need any validation today: Maybe tomorrow or another day will do: I would assume it is natural. Moments are precious: I have no time to listen to my mind>Today is tomorrow: Tomorrow will be in the present and then again the cycle continues: I walk streets at dusk and dawn. I memorized my moments that have not occurred. My mind rehearses the reels of movies and literary pages: I walk with those imageries/words lens in hand: Galaxy’s stars play visual tricks: Carnival barkers are seen and heard: I search for my Vanilla Sky:

London: Architect: Amanda Levete: Detail

I stand in front of the Eiffel: I stand next to city halls: I land in real airports and stand upright with unique whispers, whispering.

I often drown my eyes in an onslaught of visual brilliance: My eyes meld into Pieter Bruegel’s hyper-hyperbolic “The Tower of Babel.” My eyes meld into Claude Monet‘s atmospheric view of “The Seine at Argenteuil,”  A collective of noises are heard dancing with serenity: Somewhere in between lives my Vanilla Sky:

I am passengered into the Chicago’s 1893 White City Worlds’ Fair. The movie “Vanilla Sky” plays forward: I sit in a faux Ferrari 250 GTO: Times’ Square is naked and soulless: Time travel is real: Tom Cruise sits near: I imagined with innocent verve anything can be believed. I gaze into the mirrors of my past and present.

My pictures are not mine: The traces of my days making  architecture and portraits become my palimpsest: Remains: Traces of the past before me: Memories ahead: Shaped by alchemy and prophecy: Narratives are formed: Photographs shaped then and now offer glimpses into what may become my Vanilla Sky: It is what takes place in every footprint I leave behind and every footprint to be seen. The game of dream versus reality is always alive.

Tokyo: Architect: Kisho Kurokawa: Nakagin Capsule Tower

Urban discoveries are my equal to Thoreau’s pastoral wildings: Excited like a prairie dog rising in the midst of the morning sun: Things seen but not seen. I gaze into my archives chasing not memories, but occurrences:  I have witnessed decades alone-with my camera: Maybe I dream of finally seeing my  “Vanilla Sky.” Maybe I wish for too much. I  try to make sense of the traffic of imagery:  Everyday and my every night I awaken  with a penchant to pursue the thrill of my “snaps.”

There is nothing hallucinatory about the experience: I  merely need to remind myself of the experience…sort of subscribing to an idea as those may do in church: I mention in every piece I write about the cities; The cities I have walked through and across- but mostly that I gallivanted around: I have run into darkness: I have run into light: Run, walk and gallivant: All are familiar: 

I listen to the sounds in London: I pause: I listen to the sounds in Barcelona: I pause: I listen to the sounds in Tokyo: I pause: The architecture of cities I share refer to not merely a capture but a singular experience that is caught with bated breath: I can never repeat the moments because… Then I confess: Somewhere is all I need: Knowing that Bruegel and Monet complicate and equally are a balm for my mind’s eyes is absurd: Yet, sit alongside my lens for a mere snippety-snap-snap and see what is seen but not yet seen: Time is precious: Days pass- light passes-moments are lost: Monet wrote, ”The light constantly changes, and that alters the atmosphere and beauty of things every minute.” 

If I could only find the beauty once: If I could only capture the atmosphere once: If I could merely slow the entire experience into a lonely minute; I will have discovered my “Vanilla Sky.”

Barcelona: Architect: Jean Nouvel:

Architecture of Cities: Rhythms of Space and Sound

Architect: Frank Gehry: 8 Spruce Street: New York City

My eyes pace the streets-gingerly: I reconvene with my real and surrealistic photographs-daily: Everyday I step into my archives steeped in degrees of time travel: Ten or one-thousand architects I imagine: Their space, their architecture are my captures: Some and many voices are no longer among us: My eyes remember: I have preyed upon their buildings: I have morphed into a cheetah with an heralded mantle standing as camouflage: Praying for anonymity-to hear what I might see: Praying for anonymity to see what I might hear:

My mind’s eyes and ears listen to two thirty-second intros melding The Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter”with Merry Clayton’s full throttle worshipping shrill and Benny Goodmans’ “Sing, Sing, Sing” with Gene Krupa’s solo drum dance followed by torrents of woodwinds and brass: The music plays; I capture rhythms-I capture space: 

I see five-hundred cities fictionalized congregated as one: Patience-I hear the shutter-snippety-snap-snap: Daily fictions carry on. I make more snaps. The camera’s reflecting reflex captures the chorus of moments: 

Architect: Skidmore-Owings and Merrill: Principal Architect: David Childs: Moynihan Train Station

Photographing cities and the architecture within is a kinship: The eyes often feel an elated   emotional burst: Then their, my eyes, begin: I pre-visualize the unattainable: I am reminded of two and ten million moments: Maybe remembering the Japanese artist Hiroshige Utagawa’s bewildering beautiful woodblocks frozen indelibly upon my eyes + Maybe remembering the German artist Hans Bellmer bewildering beautiful poupées frozen indelibly also upon my eyes: Maybe their talented passions infuse my eyes-Intimately and broadly: Maybe their voices and a dozen-dozen artists, five photographers and more accompany my journeys: Their Images, my memories bask in the glory of fantastical accomplishment: A reminder of achievements never to be mine: Stirring to remember: Calming and disturbing: Alarmingly beautiful and frightening stories to be remembered.

A daily conjuring of ideas play repeatedly: My mind’s eyes see stories about cities and architecture mingling in and around five-hundred years and maybe five-hundred thousand years: I exaggerate on all accounts: For I never know how to single out one voice or one day to explain how I may or may not strategize my intent for content: There is tomorrow.

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

A collage of the surreal hovers: I stand hand in hand with Oscar Niemeyer at the wide bight, on the Copacabana Beach, Rio de Janeiro: We see and hear the full discharge of the Amazon River: We see and hear the Amazon forest as a collective of spheres (pause) above are seen expanding like millions of tendrils before our eyes (pause) crossing continents:

A waxing crescent moon hovers near darkness: Kettledrums tickle the air: The two of us imagine our past and present as one voice: The names of places accessible and excessive dance: Mere magic: Perfect theater.

I point northward as with a baton: I share Dhaka, Rio, Copenhagen, and Rome: We reminisce about nations and continents: We collectively animate the names of influencers in our lives: So many directions and directives are enjoined in the conversation of generational exchanges: We admire the anthropology of worlds seen: 

The day and night nearly end: We share science fictions that are true: The stars above free flow exponentially: All the stories in real time that might have been shared: Mine live in rhythms and spaces my camera has seen: Oscar’s live in designs he has made for the planet: Every capture relates to a story somewhere that my camera has seen: One thousand faces and incalculable places have made for stories: My past is here-I am among those who might wish for another  tomorrow. 

Architect: David Adjaye: 130 William: New York City

Architecture of Cities Unique Spaces on Celluloid: Yesterday and Tomorrow’s Architecture

Grand Central Station: New York City

I see architecture through many lenses: Yesterday and tomorrow come to mind: My past has been framed from eras long before mine: Eras merge: The present is seen before the future vanishes: My camera mingles atop and between streets: It is a daily reprise of my fiction’s fiction:

I imagine the first capture: Buildings breathe to be heard:

I might remember tumbling down a vaulted spiral staircase: I cannot remember: I might remember fumbling down an alp or two: I cannot remember: I do most often remember dancing amidst a blue whale’s massive baleen-That I do remember:

If I faint my world blackens: Realities may be forgotten: My finger reflexively snaps captures merely because I am somewhere: The shutter is heard as if a pendulum clock: Alerted to more than time: 

Herzog and De Meuron: 56 Leonard New York City

I march somewhere else: I remember the last snap and these words: “I didn’t want to die too soon:”

(Duke Ellington’s son Mercer about his father’s share:) I quickly realized it is time to harness the vast chronicles of my photography’s biospheric time: My captures are in my rear view mirror and slightly ahead.

I have always imagined stealing time as did Claude Monet: His plein air captures could never be mine: Monet’s light seem to last just shy of eternity: Monet’s impressions are mine in my dreams: My light vanishes as I see it: My captures are no longer dreams, but akin to Monet’s moments. I am capturing real light in real time: The light will never be again.

“Now I’ll never dance with another/

Oh since I saw her standing there.”

“I Saw Her Standing There”

Paul McCartney/John Lennon: The Beatles; 1963

I return every minute and day to what I do best: “Snippety-snap-snap”: Yesterdays world is mine today: Tomorrow is coming: Vespers are often heard across my cities: Cities become empty cavernous whispers to what may be new captures: A Vesper Martini sipped may conjure other whispers: Sacrilegious as it may seem, a calm influence on my apertures nonetheless are embraced: What prevails is framed-and I shoot as I see again.

Marble Collegiate Church/Virgin Hotel

I see today, yesterdays’ world: My camera knows time travel well: It is what the mechanical tool was built for: My mind revisits each and every frame: It is a prayer I invoke unhesitatingly: The backdrop from every capture is storied: My yesterdays remain my today’s. My pictures remain my everyday: Again I see yesterday and tomorrow, and again.

I miss celluloid as I might an old friend: I miss celluloid as I might miss an article of banished comfort clothing: I miss celluloid as I might miss a bite from the day that harks back: I miss celluloid as I might miss a gathering of friendly souls: I miss celluloid for the singular quietude that only resides in one known cranial vault:

I know for a fact that neither anthropologist, nor archaeologist could cipher through every visual evocation that accompanies me through villages, towns and cities: I have never slept without imagining what captures will follow the eventide that never arrives.

Frank Gehry 8 Spruce Street New York City and everybody else

Architecture of Cities: One Building at a Time

Gazing East: New York City: Empire State Building and More

My camera merely dreams:

A frozen pulse as if in mid-pen motion: Photographer Bill Brandt snaps poet Robert Graves: A satisfying cacophonic camera shutter freeze-frame is heard: Four imminently patient tickled ivories touch me as Keith Jarrett’s “Köln Concert” plays: Director Alan Parker’s Mississippi Burning rolls across the screen: The birthing of portentous evil is seen atop aqua blue night shaded curvy rolling hills: Writer Geoffrey Dyer’s “But Beautiful” musicians Duke Ellington and Harry Carney drive through the blackness of the night: My vision quest may be part music quest, part light quest for something not yet known: Maybe like a strip-naked vibrato, dark contoured intricacies heard ahead: Prophecies appear: There are signals of better light, near: 

Ruminating through history encourages me to engage foreign lightscapes across urban and rural destinations: The romance of missions ahead reminds me of anticipated treasures filled with hope: They are what soothe my sleeps and frighten me awake.

In every city I visit, I wonder if one city is enough: I am continually accompanied by a “Breathless” vibe. Imagine actor Belmondo; Artist Caravaggio; Cartoon character (Taz)Tasmanian Devil; And Melville’s Ahab all shrink wrapped together as a single piercing voice: I hear far and near passions breathing.

Gazing South East through a corridor of light: The Empire State Building: New York City

Continents, countries, and cities my camera has seen: 

Ernest Hemingway’s sitings appear: Hills like white elephants afar could easily or seemingly be my template for every building and cityscape I have seen or might. Every day I imagine a magicians wand hovering above my image to make: One blink and the event vanishes: Fleeting  images designed by light is an extraordinary sense of my life: I can blink one thousand times and see the building in front of me a million different ways and see divinely, canvases of urban and rural moments: Vanishing white elephants may infer my own living “Old Man in the Sea”: The white elephants may be my Melville white whale: Breathlessness days are my common denominator:

The imminent fleeting disappearance of my light pales me: My light barely remains before the camera’s f-stop shakes my aperture for the capture: Light is a rewarding selfish fleeting companion: Close your eyes once and it is gone: “Hurry” my mere camera shrieks loudly: I must always capture what appears as white elephants or another imaginary capture.

Voices ring: 

Architects Thom Mayne, David Childs, Bernard Tschumi and Charles Gwathmey, ring my phone: All are known across the architectural curriculum: Their place in history is not mine: Their voices heard on my iPhone audio become considerations and possibly proclamations for where and why my camera should focus: They as in an a cappella of visual ideas offered intuitive advice: My eyes were momentarily flooded with their ideas: Their visions merged into mine: The moments reminded of  archaeologists softly navigating like a brain surgeon: The soft lift of  the skull for observation; Like the archaeologist sifting through a layer of soil many times more fragile than a finite sprinkle of salt on our diet: If I apply the gentle nudging, siphoning through ideas of others I just might discover the moment- the architects design: The results sometimes fail to share what I see: Often I imagine I hear “Eureka” bellowed  between my interlocking ears: Voices of suggestions sometimes may be what the camera needed.

Gazing South and West: The Empire State Building: New York City

The photographer’s art of fact and fiction is often about utilizing space and time: Astrophysicists

live in some respect by a similar notion: They ask us to imagine beyond the stars: They like photographers use math and science to determine an inevitable truth: We all must assume a leap of faith that the truth is before our eyes: The photograph and stars are just right there: Look closely.

The light we see and the light not seen illuminate our stories: 

My photography reminds me of the movie title “La Grande Vadrouille” (a grand stroll)-The life with camera in tow: Maybe everything I share is akin to Duke Ellington’s confession that he does not play piano, but is just dreaming; Maybe I have not made thousands of pictures, I am merely dreaming.

Gazing above: Empire State Building: New York City

New Architecture of Cities: The Sounds We Never Hear

The Morning of…

I saw the smoke travel a few distances afar: Across the backdrop of an entire silhouetted city: Colors arose as did the sunlight: It was impossible to enjoy the palette with the unmistakable fraught and fright: With the rising sun you could move your eyes genuinely with appreciative glances: The imagined sounds were much louder than the real unnatural sounds: A jarring nightmare never dissipates:

The known universe hailed: My imagination is better: The convergence of emergency transportation reeled and riled:The smoke did not float as if piggybacking bilious clouds: The temperature inversion merely tattooed the meaning of horror atop almost 200 hundred known countries: The smokes constant merely inspired an entire world to grieve: I imagined; 7 billion known: People looked in the mirror.

The mirror is  never about self reflection: The mirror has way too many suggestive meanings: Precisely, the mirror is about a crime scene: What did you see when is what the history books retain: What did you see when is what your heirs hopefully will remember.

another day, another sound: Another frame of mind: The New World Trade Center

There is another type of sound:

My Ted Turner is about different sounds and pictures-my pictures in a box:  He opened the door to his Ford 150 pick up truck: We didn’t have a lot of words for each other: The  morning until we arrived was deafening: Silence breathed so many stories: I felt like the writer Jim Harrison hitching a ride with with Walden’s Thoreau and Teddy Roosevelt: I never imagined the Rough Riders until that morning AM.

Ted took aim at the bare life: Clearing the land, a pose before death: If only I could share the details: I cannot: The blast heard from near Ted’s eyes, was just near: Championing the natural land: Issues about up keep and imaginable privilege of landscape to behold: The morning silence pounded: Nary a soul: Unnerving is not known by most: We, two bona fide strangers stretched across the brook to be sure: We walked not hand in hand: He postured: The ensuing sound deafening and a mere more: Understanding  a caven heart only increases the possibility of confusions.

The quiet sound of space: Lincoln Center, New York City: Artist Henry Moore

The sounds rule:

The  sounds that rule our days are irrevocable: Memories live: Passionate rivers near by were unceremoniously unleashed: Sounds of electrical signals are converted: A constant heart beats: In the distant, Fly fishing reels rigorous volumes like streaks of clothes lines playing house to collective flies: Quietude is simulated amidst the seen silence: A state of affairs most will never hear:

The lure’s lonely flight captures my attention momentarily and forever: The appeal continues as a mere crest of a river moistens my eyes lashes: A must to be close: The near currents wave action:

What lies beneath the rivers tips and tops  has an endless appeal even if never seen; What might be above: A dream from top to bottom as the British Harrier hovers: Everything genius may be presupposed: Sound is silence: My camera hears from the north and the south: 

Wilderness is where I stand every day: The urban and rural remain calm: Something spectacular has occurred in my ends: When my heart stops my eyes still remember: It is as if in my bedtime sleep the impossible is never whispered: “To sleep, perchance to dream. At, there’s the rub,/ For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,/…Must give us pause”.

Hamlet

By William Shakespeare

Two sounds not comparable in anyway; yet.

I stand atop two separate spheres of our abyss: Two sounds continue to reverberate: I am in constant reruns of stories scene sounds I am desperate to forget and inclusively remember:  When my heart stops my eyes still remember.

The Quietest Volume of Sound; Artist, Giacometti: Foundation Beyeler, Switzerland

Architecture of Cities: Kafka’s Children

architect Calatrava: St Nicholas National Shrine

The wand stirs the planet’s cauldron below and imagined: Transformative powers arise: There is a real subconscious: It resembles a dream: It resembles a reality that I have not known: A singular place where metamorphous believers Ovid, Dante, Kafka assembled as a cabal: Nightmarish realities alight among spectral prisms. Dreams do come true. Imagine my youthful thrill: Far from the madding crowd is where worlds of imaginary dreamscapes live: Far from the madding crowd is where my eyes meet unsparingly my three tenses:

I sit in awash of dreams: I see billowy clouds as in the dream is where I imagine fictitious eyes breathe: Eyes of the real Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s atmospheric truths, live: It is a place where I caress the Pyramid of Cestius: The exacting execution is simply imagined: One day my camera will emulate the exquisite precisions: To be a draftsman with my mechanical eyes:

One day I will capture a dreamery likeness to Piranesi’s The Round Tower: A simple investigation into a troubled brilliance: The exactitude of a surreal mind: A maze for the imagination: A tour of architectural designs my portraits may become:

After 9/11 St Nicholas Shrine

I feel a kinship with a mechanical tool: My camera: It must send up red flags to networks of institutional asylums: All on twenty-four hour alert to my preposterous visual expectations: The sky above illuminates faces in my crowded mind: Ken Kesey, Randle Patrick McMurphy and Chief appear: Who better to dance around the maypole than a cuckoo’s nest of a few good men:

Piranesi I seek for visual answers: Bizarre nightmares reconfigured dreams and creative forces live inside my lens: The metamorphosis is a constant. If only to make sense of Kafkaesque like ideas:

I once traced the origins of horse racing: Maybe seven thousand years before today: A transformative experience that I never witnessed, occurred: The desert, mountains and windswept sands felt the power of four hooves: More modern episodes followed in Chester, England, Hempstead Long Island,and more across the natural world: A race became a story that beget another: At dawn and twilight I listen for the thundering hooves of ghosts: When time before me passes I realize something was where I am before I knew: Echoes of a real life made memories that an orchestra of citizens cheered and applauded: The quoted orchestra is only a wind in the past: Like the entire planet something was always before: My camera begs to see that apparition and make a story-a mechanical story:

I dream again: My days and years sit in reverie: Not a true second passes without a bit of naïveté: I sit, where the other realists sit: I still pause for Ben-Hur.

Met Life and One Madison: The New Version

The pages of One Thousand and One Nights comes to a close: The true romance of my real life dangles powerful stories about my vanishing world: Real buildings in real time: Architectural footprints never disappear: The lives above and below may: It is a happy scary metaphor about the lives that were and the ones we dream about: There is no infinite number: Lives and buildings have become mere numbers aside from when I travel to all of my continents, countries and cities:

I utilize my spot meter, the one lofting atop my irises: The history of me is cloistered in an imaginary glass Matryoshka doll: Beneath me and above architecture has become lives of others and my life from afar.

It seems I could be like Kafka’s Gregor from within and about: It is a ridiculous science fiction account of a life on the streets: What if it is true. Why would I sit awash in vacillating dreams: Why would I swim through voluminous ponds reveling atop lily pads where tad poles reign! This curious child’s mind is innocent: The mind elevates atop a trampoline and aboard a seesaw

Unsparingly my eyes ride among my three tenses: Transformative powers engage: The light of the world is my moment to capture:  What was, what was once: Did I imagine: What remains: a storage capacity on steroids: So I dream:

I sit alone and alert as if in the darkest quarry: Enclosed in a Swedish like wind-eye is a happy place: Science Fiction becomes reality: Nightmares are fabulous dreams: The past is replaced with the present: A nano second of frivolity is near: Memories are present in different guises: No time for more; Marvin Gaye’s Inner City Blues plays just around and near: Take a listen. I have pictures to take about my vanishing world.

The Original Met Life

Architecture of Cities: The Vicinity of Antiquity

First Presbyterian Church: New York City

The vicinity of antiquity: My camera has captured centuries seen: A world of architecture before we knew where antiquity became: I have been to where history has assumed its place in our present: I  lingered just near Dante’s Inferno: I stood in front of Rodin’s “Hell’s Gate”: The ubiquitous moderne contemporary is always near: The vicinity of architectural antiquity is too near: My camera need not return to where the Pyramids lie: My camera was there too: My camera merely needs some place older than now. The camera merely captures a world that is true and mysterious; factual and fictional. We peek upon something that sings antiquity is always present: In transition: Bill Evans plays the B Minor Waltz: Ebony atop, alongside ivory may be heard: A history of pitter patter plays near: The near is now to the then. Am I in the vicinity of antiquity or something more.

Imaging antiquities is akin to a conversation with the known gods: Mankind’s voices follow: The  fabric of past millenniums reveal overlapping architectural narratives: Evolution may be realized/witnessed: Few realize: From Egyptian Pharaohs and pyramids to A.I. The play of captures reveal centuries across our planet: They are almost always near to my eyes  mind:

The Amber Fort: Jaipur India

Animal kingdoms championed by kings show their true colors: Hiding in the bush among whispering grasses and more: The wind awakens scents: The camera pauses for a pose: A cluster of the known and unknown illicit secrets the lens espies: I am one foot in antiquity: One foot in the futures’ near: I want the story to be what my moment and decades have seen and not seen: It can be like coming home from battle: Exhausted by my own scrambling feet: I see the past and the future just under.

Familiar voice’s gather: Friends roam near my arms and eyes: Rustichello da Pisa and Italo Calvino share private Kublai Khan remembrances: The cities and histories of then seem so present: The mind clings to the vicinity of antiquity: 

The sounds of Duke Ellington and Johnny Hodges Haupe plays in the wind as Charlie Chaplins’ projected grace dances on old New York SoHo’s past: Geniuses Duke and Chaplin for a mere few minutes levitate my camera to new heights: I stand, pause, pose and listen to my very own snippety-snap-snap: The  pitter-patter of millions and millenniums continue to pass above and under my history: The kingdom of the jungle kings can be heard across continents: My camera captures:

Jaipur, India

I stand somewhere in Ethiopia, Egypt or China: I feel like a war torn tusked Mammoth: I want to sing the epic poem of the Faerie Queene: A convergence of past and present are my navigators to not a mere capture but a captivating experience.

The cities are in every ten-thousand frames and more: I can feel the fatigue: I can rumba with all of my histories: I pause: My curiosity is on a constant steroidal fix: Centuries reign in my dreams: Thoughts race: A rear wing arches high atop the Carrera Porsche: The elegant tour de force-the famed Mulsanne Corner at Le Mans(the 24 Hours of Le Mans) evokes fervent pauses of awe to the spectators: For the utmost passionate, the world slows: A lasting glimpse of the romantic real: A bare trace of a red brake light streaks past near descension: The sleek slick wet surface swims under the the favored engineered divine: Before it vanishes like an apparition down the connecting straightaway-All that is left is the sound once seen: I begin again.

One Madison Avenue: New York

Architecture of Cities: Voices: Oracles: Oscar Niemeyer, Roberto Burle Marx

Oscar Niemeyer

I imagine I can see the world in picoseconds: I imagine my captive captures may be seen through gigayears: I stand naked atop an entire seven seas of whales begging to be captured:

For five millenniums past since before today I have imagined Egyptian Blue: The first known dye from pigments: I Imagine the first fifteenth century morning when Albrecht Dürer toiled to meet Martin Schongauer: Everything in picoseconds, everything in gigayears everything to be discovered: Egyptians and Germans coming to gather as one wave of of cerebrospinal fluid delivering nutrients of ideas to one single digital snap of my arrival to make a single capture.

I allow myself to fantasize about my light touching people and places: I have compiled an army of historical occurrences, sciences and discoveries in my heart’s eyes: 

Roberto Burle Marx at NYC Botanical Gardens

One minute minute to explore what was before all of us: Now I can compose my focus, my lens to become: The moments’ memory lives in a real imagined galaxy of captures hear on earth: 

I revel about what has vanished in my dreams and realities: Places and people who are lens perfect in my captures reminds me of what I have yet to see:

“Words are our servants, not our masters.” (Richard Dawkins, 1986, The Blind Watchmaker).

I have followed Dürer, Schongauer and Egyptian Blue not to mimic/imitate: Not to revisit history and sciences from before me: I have followed the above to wildly imagine how I may see what becomes:

I have stood toe to toe with most of the famous and more architects from the past half century:

They at one time knew little about me: I knew not enough about them:

I did know as I have traveled for their work and to capture their architecture my eyes needed to be armed with history and presence: The colors of space and time needed to be articulated: Again, I drift back among the gigayears in picseconds to see what I can see: I think many moments would be appropriate to explore and share:

Roberto Burle Marx at NYC Botanical Gardens

Maybe one of the more astounding engagements was with the real Oscar Niemeyer: I have written about Niemeyer before: My moments with him were a  gift that keeps on giving: A gift of words: A gift for my eyes: He shared thoughts and ideas: He shared stories as in friendships with Roberto Burle Marx: We adored and admired what Marx left for us: We gazed hand in hand across Ipanema: I was the impressionable: Oscar merely admired his own history: He had seen the entire planet in his imaginative designs: I was feeling still in my infancy:The collective impressions and expressions our conversation shared remain: It was as if we grew and evolved as one: Oh such naive and impressionable dreams make for such fantasies:

I feel that we powered  forward together: Me imagining a future; he straddling 90 years and then some: Two souls melding as if by all osmosis: I was able to  dance upon tomorrow’s tomorrow: My feet pedaled atop the enormity of a thousand verdant lotus leaves.

Oscar transcends the centuries in my lifetimes: He is my Egyptian Blue: He was my fellow traveler in gigayears: We shared a whispering renaissance of time with fellow Brazilian Burle Marx: Brazil in the most minute way was mine as well as theirs:

Few have stamped their mark on a conversation as Oscar and Marx had for me: The vivid captures in my mind are equal tribute and homage to the art of another time, the captures in times today.

A Norman Foster Design for JP Morgan: But the eyes I borrowed for this image are Oscar Niemeyer’s: Oh to be set free by Oscar

Architecture of Cities: 75 Cities in One Day: The Race for Light: Race Against Time

London: The Shard: Architect Renzo Piano

Racing against time, the light turns to something before dusk: The rhythm matters: My own American version of an Irish jig: Untold stories appear: Pictures are designing architecture: My lenses see the captures displayed: The jig remains:

There are no stories of people in my travels: Billions is a number too many: Imagine all cross-legged around the fireplace/hearth listening to my tales of fractions, seconds in travels impossible to appreciate: I Look into my one pair of eyes: Entire galaxies of planets align: More than one is too many:

I don’t have time to imagine: Dread is ahead: The last light of the night is the end of twilight: My second favorite time to capture: I stretch reality: I find my footing: I stretch reality again: I tell stories not told: 

A cavalcade of names and places for decades have been married to my photography: Ancient influencers shared their perspectives: Decades became a lifetime of days:: Weegees, Brandts, Strands and thousands remain by my side: Photography’s icons enlisted to meld their/mine periphery: I marched into

Mid Town Manhattan: New York City

I spent a day with  Oscar Niemeyer; I spent a day with Zaha; I spent a day with Nouvel, I spent a day with Johnson plus thousands:  A finite collective of artists: Jasper, Ellsworth, Miro,and bits of Andy also whispered: I have spent the luxury of a lifetime immersed in filmdoms Spartacus, The Hill, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Pixote, Cool Hand Luke and ten thousand more: 

To be alone with my heroes and demons is a bit of captured heaven: Throbs and trebles play like pixilated sound waves; a collective of wonders: Names and faces, places and days become one; I run, I race:

Keith Jarrett’s Köln concert plays in the distance: A regular minimalist of devoted passion sounds ahead; George Simenon’s Maigret lurks about: No volume, just quiet: Influences remain a mainstay in every capture: Something knowingly naked awaits: The life ahead awakens as it did before.

My photographers’ eye conjures a vast uniquely science fiction narrative: Walter Tevis’s The Man Who Fell to Earth’s sees Newton’s presence alit on earth: The presumed performance is innately me: The identity is absurd: The kinship is only realized in my own desert mirror: My entire oeuvre is merely me manufacturing my presence in front of the world’s built environment: Filmmakers like Nicholas Roeg, David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick and a few others saw alternative universes: Their mind-stretching cinematics  became a kinship I could never let go of: A whisper from Wim Wenders suggested; make it more than seen before, became my mantra before I was twelve years of age: I remain to photograph realities and narratives: Something’s not seen but living in hiding:

Tokyo: Architect Kenzo Tange: Yoyogi National Gymnasium

I have often offered up a personal sacrifice not unlike the Aztec/Inca  sacrifice for a greater good; a greater god: Take my eyes tomorrow allow me to see today: 

Light is missing here and there: I play hide and seek among atmospheric dimensional corridors: My mind sees all of my captures like the Spring Equinox: Light is everywhere before it vanishes: The end is near. The train to somewhere can no longer go fast enough: My eyes run full throttle: The moon or sun light may soon vanish: The mission to frame the building might be inconsequential if I do not shoot:

Five hundred sun tanning birds perched: They assailed the locals with spewing vulgar avian tongue lashings; Like a racket of squabbling tenors under the vaulted St. Patrick’s Cathedral: Atop the equally proportioned parapet and sill, flocks espy my race for time: They watch for fun:

I could be a lonely man standing in a rain puddle: I could be among the four Beatles humming A Day in the Life: My sanity imagines: I imagine fractions of sounds across my landscape: A crashing sound begins: The end is near: The beginning of the end is so bright: Beautiful sounds are echoing from afar: I snap to live today and tomorrow: There is nothing powerful or alluringly striking: Just the capture that day: 

I am alone as in Kafka’s Metamorphosis:  I am Buzz Aldrin posturing for Neil Armstrong until I lift off from my lunar perch: The entirety of decades’ experiences lifting my spirits from the moon to earth. I race to best time: I manufacture dreams to understand: I capture time within time.

Architect: Make Architects: 10 Weymouth: Fitzrovia, London

Architecture of Cities: Writers and Stories: The Road Through

quiet London

The Road to Damascus concept is overwhelmingly too dramatic:  My lives as a photographer are quiet and simple: The zen wars that collude with my daily sensorial encounters are enough to contend with: Just hear what I need to:

I imagined as I do, purposefully passengering on a local train from New York City, America to Montreal, Canada: Traveling north between cities and countrysides is an exercise for any mind: Riding any train to anywhere and nowhere reminds me of an army of Galileos embracing centuries of histories, histories of centuries: A world of place and person unfamiliar to me becomes: My camera would become an experience to celebrate: To celebrate for myself:

My thirteen hour journey was to bring me to photograph at the Canadian Centre for Architecture: The venerable Phyllis Lambert and the esteemed Pritzker architects Herzog & de Meuron awaited: I had imagined that the train to, was an easy way to imagine my camera work ahead: The extended train ride was to compel my mind to imagine what the session would look like when completed: I had imagined many things:

A German Interior Designer had given me a book to read for my travels: W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz was a novel that apparently all of the architects had read or…: I thought a perfect companion might be a book to hide inside for the travel and duration: I could listen to the rumble and screeching train: The industrial noise machine might be a good way to fend off the din from the outside world: I was wrong: 

Herzog& de Meuron Parrish Museum Long Island

A neuro map of my past and future brain  blasts like Led Zeppelin‘s Black Dog: My eyes see broken prismatic schemes across the sky: A circus of imaginary acts perform for some, today for one: My mind traveled: My eyes transported: Atop a vacant globe I dance along the seven seas: Whales and the entire “deep” performs: My eyes melded with maps of the ancients: Discovery ahead?  My mind was on a collision course with dreams: My eyes pierced through and beyond galaxies of time travel: Explorers march on: Normalcy is not convenient when I travel: Alien nations ahead: Montreal will be near: Music plays: Austerlitz is quietly remarkable.

I take a word, a place: I follow it like Pynchon’s “dancing ball”: Sebald’s Austerlitz in many ways disorients: My natural me snaps a frame: Sebald diagrams whispers: His words whisper: My eyes respond: I conjure action and surrealism: I close some pages: The train passes battlegrounds for war: Landscapes are where nations and cultures battled: Revolutions and settlements lived and died: Austerlitz becomes symbolic of a greater universe: My eyes travel to the 19th century Battle of Austerlitz: My eyes marvel at the grace and elegancy of the Gare d’Austerlitz: 

My train gurgles a bit: The book reminds me of cultures flooding my eyes like salmon spawning in their seasons: Nothingness become dreamscapes: The train rolls north. I am witness to life forces that will forever alter my visual perceptions: There is a real invisible Chemin de fer that surrounds me and challenges the course of my visual future: Along a path to: I step: My train lurches: My mind realizes I am witnessing the history of mine as a history adjoined by others:

On the Road from Yusuhara, Japan

Paul Auster’s City of Glass reminds me of  my mind drifting into insanity:  Federico Garcia Lorca’s Poet in New York has a particular symbiosis to Auster’s “City..”: My mind is in theirs: I hear another more enviable voice: Miguel de Cervantes winks at my camera: His Quixote is my entertainment: Joined by Lorca, Auster and Sebald the four scribes  ride atop my train: One whispers: Another finds frantic: Another swallows insanity and finally the last most fraught, fights the tilting windmills. Different voices but eyes that are mine: Their history belongs to us:

Thirteen hours on a train: An ephemeral spiritual life says hello: I learn to dance: Dance is known and sometimes taught: I feel movement: I learn that the sensational Fred Astaire’s given name was Austerlitz: From today back in time when I photographed Astaire( Austerlitz) all of my naked dancing atop whales becomes inordinately clear: I was meant for this moment: I was meant to dance with words and places: The tides await: I will swim.

Words are becoming my path to pictures seen and not taken: History of centuries are upon me:

A few guys with words on paper walk with me into the Canadian Centre for Architecture: Phyllis, Jacques and Pierre greet me: The journey north enlightened my journey: Max Sebald whispers: Paul stands quietly: Federico’s eyes plead: Cervante’s Quixote marches me to my dance.

Dubai to Bangladesh

Architecture of Cities: Two Places as One:

Martin Puryear in Madison Park

Everyday nature beckons: My lenses focus on the irrational natural: The universes’ cities beckon: I focus: Mark Twain’s “Two Ways of Seeing a River” comes to mind: A beckoning for answers: The episodic rivers’ rhythm plays tricks on my eyes: Two views of nature flows: I step one foot into T.S Eliots’ beautiful enigmatic horrors: The tragedy and hope he possesses sing: Disaster reigns as it resonates: Beauty appears in his hand written The Waste Land: My eyes heart is crushed and alive:

I further my dreamscape: I step another imaginary tangible space: Beauty becomes passion: Darwins’ scientific dreams and adventures aboard the HMS Beagle ride ahead: The wake carries my imaginary eyes to another imaginary tangible: The two stories become cousins: My visual world, which may be a literary marriage appears: My mind is swirling with dreams not known: My past travels in reverse: centuries become my histories: My past and future desires are illuminated:

Metaphors seem abstract but true to my ears: I struggle to remain focused: I struggle to hear my steps: I remain to capture anew pictures from worlds apart: The worlds empower me: I am almost always like a naked octopus afoot: I troll behind a tribe of pied pipers: So we sing:

Empires appear drawn like topography seen from space: There is an axis between the north and south poles: I feel my camera may be connected to an entire planet in one single lens reflex: I have remembered inspirations and nightmares: The nature I have not seen, will become my camera’s urban landscape: There are photographs I had not taken: 

Seville Spain Police Station

In 1854, British photographer Roger Fenton snapped: His photographs bleed an elegancy that blinds me: His images  remind me that I have made a career with one foot in nature and the other as an urban architectural explorer: Roger Fenton one hundred and seventy-five years before me made the image that would become my mantra: Rievaulx Abbey appears as a life force to a grace in photography that will never be mine: A force to emulate, but never: In Fenton’s one breath nature beckons: His eyes on architecture fold into my lens: Now I am allowed to march alone and in my future:

In all of my photographs there is a song: I know I listen to as I follow my cousins and marriages to bigger and brighter more intimate captures ahead: I follow all of the signs left for me to gather like Pick Up Sticks: Heroes and Heroines abound: Animals and fairy tales thrive in my awakenings: My future is near:

Mark Twain’s mind floats atop the rivers currents again and tomorrow: I would die to be in his mind for a mere second or two: My calling as a photographer has always hovered near and above nature: It may have hovered above a river, a mountain a desert or urban oasis: A road through any wilderness real or imagined becomes a constant:

Los Angeles Library

 I recall dreaming above and below riptides: I recall the Russian KGB sending me through a Moscow forest into nothingness: I recall seeing  a garter snake at two: I broke a collar bone at age five: I saw a bear in the woods at nine: I recall being lodged between two cars: My motorcycle below me was steeped in the pavement: I recall I was eleven dancing tepidly or more at a concert in Watts, Los Angeles: Count Basie, Joe Williams, and Sarah Vaughn sang and played their hearts out for me and thousands more: My first or third kiss was somewhere between five and nine: I escaped a cult in Hawaii: I was a teen: Barely any clothes on I may have looked like Munch‘s The Scream: I share because I acutely remember shadows atop stones or grass on every corner: Why would I not remember every episode and more that influenced my camera’s eyes:

I feel I am alone with my camera: I trace the steps: The years pass: I certainly remember the nature of me seeing what would become: My life as a photographer spins amidst fathomable dreams: Moments I think I lived. 

My constant companions have been travels and travails for photography: From Acadia to New Orleans I have been: I have stood between Oscar Niemeyer and Zaha Hadid: I was alone atop a Dacha in Moscow: My eyes careened past the English Lake Country before I saw London: Photographers Julius Shulman and Gordon Parks once held my hands: I have been places: I have been among people: The nature I am culturally steeped in is alive.

Spirit: 

“Nature’s Way” 

“It’s nature’s way of receiving you

It’s nature’s way of retrieving you.”    

There a new criterion for nature my camera begs? My two feet stand between two universes: The natural and the urban natural: I experience a rush as it is thrust upon me naturally: Eidetic memory could be real: New captures are imminent: What about yesterday: What will become tomorrow: I race with an exaggerated pulse to see: Then it may be gone: I meander in a static flow: My world stands still: I move:

Forrest Myer artist

Architecture of Cities: The Watermelon Man’s Belle Époque

New and Old New York City

Decades have come and gone: My camera has been steeped in delicious: Steeped in time: Steeped in history: Miracles for my heart’s eyes: Cities became common exposures: Experiences became common: I realized I was not listening, enough:

Jazz musician Herbie Hancock wanted to write a song about the Black experience: He had known the history: He knew the sounds he had heard, but not the rhythm nor melody that could become a sound, a song: He listened acutely to the cobblestone back alleys of Chicago: He learned: The Watermelon Man became a sound, a song:

Listening for sounds reminds me of sounds heard and sound seen: I heard the dead in Babi Yar scream as they moved underfoot: I saw sounds of revolution as I past by the Potemkin stairs of Odessa: I imagined William Shakespeare: I stood aside the reconstructed “Globe”: I listened for the spilling beer and applause: I was hoping for a sonnet to be heard: I froze my stride in Moscow’s Red Square: What was I listening for: I listened: I reimagined China, in Shenzhen: What was I listening for:  I wanted to see my unknown China:My dreams live in three dimensional sectors: My dreams live among the realities of others: My camera rekindles the love of our past/present not yet lived by me:

Gravity’s Rainbow:

“…with a face on every mountainside,

And a Soul on ev’ry stone…”

Thomas Pynchon

Humayun’s Tomb: Delhi, India

:

I have imagined I lived inside the lives of astrophysicists and anthropologists: I imagine the future I relive the past: Everything is on the table: I merely have to place one foot in every direction and follow with my second foot:

All I am doing is manipulating my camera to hear the sounds and see before me our past:

I have heard the lessons of joy from Henry Miller’s everything: I have dreamed about “…Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.” I have imagined myself taking a winter’s farm life in O.E. Rølvaag’s “Giants in the Earth:

I have been everywhere and anywhere to hear my own “Watermelon Man” To hear the sounds that others make and “snippety-snap-snap”: I have dreamed about the stars over the Nile: I have walked atop streets not yet made: I have walked atop streets not yet excavated:  Sounds not yet emanating appear:I have not heard; maybe the Watermelon Man’s cobblestone’s: Then some more and  again I “snippety-snap snap.”

Somewhere in time I was in the dream from Bernard Malamud’s “The Natural.” I graced the luxuries and crimes in Hilary Mantels’ other century dramas: Robert Heinlein and Issac Asimov carried my eyes and, to real embellished fictions:

Imagine if you will to be on a corner with the immensity of industrial noises imbuing my film with more not known, yet: Imagine if you will to be standing alone at the “Four Corners” intersection: Sounds not heard yet are moving onward: Imagine the sounds never heard are what only your camera hears.

The Unisphere: New York City World’s Fair

There is the Belle Époch: A beautiful era: There is no such thing: The camera rises to capture  as any champion must do: To succeed, is to discover: There is a sweet spot ahead: It is not just a victory to capture; In failure there is some success: Rewards from century to century shift: We accommodate our dreams and hopes: We want all of our time here’s Belle Époch/a beautiful era:A century of World’s Fairs; The Great Exhibition of 1851: The 1889 Exposition Universelle; Chicago’s World’s Cumbrian Exposition of 1893; are only mere dates: The beautiful era only becomes when the  stones unturned reveal: Mountainsides afore: History before me and then some more are heard by some but not all: Ahead is our beautiful era

The camera does not see my Watermelon Man: My camera merely hears The Watermelon Man and awaits: My camera on steroids achingly listens: The next or another discovery is ahead: The Beautiful Eras, The Belle Épochs are memories our hearts, minds and eyes leech on: It is a secure place to enjoin our history’s link to us in the now: Every era must be beautiful because it is ours: Silly sad to diminish the now:

Allow me time for light: Allow me the time to photograph the past ahead: Allow me the time to capture; the heroic or the common: There are no miracles in sight: A mere arousal is ahead: A freedom to see the world: Sounds are near, we have yet to expose.

The Sultan Ahmet Mosque Blue Mosque detail, Istanbul, Turkey

Architecture of Cities: Lives not seen: The Home within the House: How We dream to Live

Philip Johnson’s Glass House

Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young

“Our House” 

“Our house is a very, very, very fine house.”

Every lens needs an imperative: My eyes follow: My heart espies a capture: I need a mere ear to hear how I breathe: It is there: Dreams never known become alive as fiction becomes a dream come true: Curiosities are unleashed my camera is unchained: Practical sensibilities are tossed into the wind: My heart races:

Beyond a mere design there lives a home: Beyond there is a story: Exuberance from memories surface: The ghosts walk about: Sometimes they are real: Sometimes I merely arch my ear to listen: I realize there is light: I follow: Possibly the future points towards possibilities: Dreamscapes seem to advance:

The heart of the matter is at hand: Some houses have faces: Some become an excavator’s dream goal: To see more and beyond: 

Acquainted I became with the ocean: My eyes follow the sight line: Frank Lloyd Wright captured my imagination: The Carmel by the Sea house posed: Aspen trees enveloped the mountainside before I saw: The Charles Deaton’ “Sculptured House” as seen in Woody Allen’s “Sleeper.” Eyeing me as I drove by: Aliens in the mist: The house bore a whole in me: Majesty in a futuristic way: Beautiful to dream about: Houses of our imaginations appear in many forms: The stories that accompany anything built is what differentiates between fiction’s truths and realities‘ dreams:

Architects:: Audrey Matlock

If you visit a Museum of Natural History, a story will likely unfold: The stories held inside will take you back to another time: You will visit the ghosts that lived before you, the ghosts that were you before now: A broad bank of empirical data may lift your mind: Places and dates some times may be forgotten: Everything is there to be relived and discovered:Our mind envelopes as we live in future discoveries: The history of another time will send you in reveries not engaged before: Then you will dream within your imagination: You will dream again: A place not encountered: A place of natural exotica awaits: Just take a peek:

The place at hand in all museums is a house: A house that is home to stories from the past: Marginally we  make way for another tomorrow: Behind the front door between four walls there is an evocative narrative: Behind the design there is an evocative plan: My camera enjoins the two identities and investigates: The simple joy of discovery is near:

I know that my camera lives in cinematic moments: Possibly my mind tries to trick the camera to mimic not merely the moments; but the sensories  traveling in and around the house: Stories are told to me: I lend an eye to see things: I hear and feel the ghosts:

Frank Lloyd Wright: Carmel By the Sea

The House does not have to be artistic in order to explore: It may be a greenhouse: It may be a multimillion dollar structure intended to be spectacular, but ending up like a cryogenic house of doom:

The beauty of a house in cinema is an adventure into a magical transactions from  possibilities  to the imaginary improbabilities: Hitchcockian Vertigo on steroids: That is why I engage: It is the manner in which my camera articulates its own galaxy:

“Suddenly”, there is Frank Sinatra attempting to assassinate the president: There is “Contempt”, atop  Capri’s Casa Malaparte: We entertain the “High Sierra” with Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino:

“Diamonds Are Forever”, introduces architect John Lautner to a larger audience: We visit the faux studio design intrigues presented in the Cary Grant drama: “North By Northwest”: “Gone With The Wind’s” Twelve-Oaks” passionately binds us to the mystery of a home’s power: “Giant’s” Reata reminds me of the power of past, present and future: Our lives today and tomorrow:

Cinema proposes to me: It offers a journey to an entire planet: Cinema allows my camera to manifest its images across the same planet I have seen in dreams: 

Joan Didion wrote about a murder and mayhem story occurring behind a white picket fence:

I have for decades reminded myself of stories never seen but imagined: Winnie the Pooh’s house “Sanders”, is a home for those young and old to see and touch: The animated possibilities are where moving pictures come from: It is the same way that a novel or novella can be written about Edward Hoppers’ “Morning Sun”  allows us to entertain the world we think we see and the world we imagine we might be able to see: The forever evolve continues to pace my visual imagination: I begin again everyday with another:

Many years ago I sat with the artist Jenny Holzer amid the shades of abundant Red Maples and Water Oaks: Her fame flamed in neo conceptually projected across buildings and city scapes:

Her mind saw galaxies beyond ours: Yet that day her eyes were home: Here in nature near her house was home: Jenny’s house stood near, but she was here: I at first wondered and then dreamed what what was inside her house: Were we home where we sat or was there another, home:

My travels have taken me from somewhere near and far: I have always wondered what lives lived inside the magic of a houses’ home:

Architect: Kengo Kuma

Architecture of Cities

Dubai in transition

THE WHISPERING SILENCE:

My gaze was frozen alive: A modern ancient world spanned across continents: Twenty-four hours measured as if a lifetime: Dhaka, Dubai and New York City posed for my captures: Ten Lenticular clouds danced quietly and aloud above and about: I was reminded of Picasso’s beach parasol hovering and shading over Jacqueline: You could hear the sounds and listen for the shadows:

A Mesopotamian cartographer heard whispers of silence: Sumerian and Akkadian ghosts marched in step: The ancients like band members joined in the play: My mind had nipped a scratch on a 78 LP: A carousel in rewind of a living history spun around a maypole: My eyes lived in centuries before and centuries to follow: The Queens Gambit on steroids appeared: Across territorial landscapes pawns and queens moved with dynamism at warp speed: Beth Harmon (the protagonist) display  was not for the faint of hearts: Walter Tevis was my Merlin: Manipulating each move across naked  terrains as if in a silent movie: Each move seen but not heard: My eyes were alerted to new captures: Antiquities appeared: Intergalactic possibilities appeared: This was no Walden pastoral: This was me trying to figure out each and very move with my silent  bumbling heroic comedic sidekicks Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin in tow: It was as if I was dodging energy bubbles to get where I needed to be: Time is never a friend: Twenty-four hours to conquer three cities became a window of trapezoids peering into my selective passions:

contemporary Mosque in Dhaka, Bangladesh

I dream again: My irises feel the melding colors from cityscapes atop: The colors I have seen, have never been mine alone: There is my next chess move: Maybe twenty to twenty-five moves ahead are planned: Like Merlin’s magical potions: His elongated fingers were creating moves to see: The exotic spell like dreams reminded me of another master with elongated fingers: The former Russian Grandmaster chess champion Mikhail Tal had legendary powers: Once under his influence, his magistral visions for board play could easily be a template for me: Imagine moving across multiple urban arenas with plans to anticipate ideas not seen: Imagine to assemble an army of ideas to see globally across metropolises for a lifetime: Can you hear the power of silence:

“I’ve had a lot af worries in my life, 

most of which never happened.”

-Mark Twain

Zaha Hadid: The Opus by Omniyat

On most days, a cascading plunge of seeable words and dreams appear: I pluck a single word from that memory: The word may or may not spawn another: Until I begin: 

Jack Kerouac’s Satori in Paris, plays havoc with my visual consciousness daily: Satori is an affliction: I have chased after meanings about meanings for an entire career: There are no accidents just moments: Every time I lift a device to see my world I inhale: Exhale follows a bit later: Time takes time: I just need to know if I have found what I am looking for: The whispers silently continue: I exhale:

Dreams become memories: Memories become captures: I make another move: Color is seen: A sound may be heard: I see: I move in or afar: I capture: Memories remember more dreams: 

The Flatiron New York City

Architecture of Cities: Below and Above

Looking North from the World Trade Center

I was ten years old when I first thought to fly unencumbered by an airplane or other devices: I saw flight from from thousands of feet above: I measured the landing from my perch to the softness of the green grass: I measured the landing into a caldera that had not yet existed: I was ten.

From the day after and the rest of my time I have allowed my imagination to tippy-toe from above:

 The Wings of Desire’ angel Bruno Ganz could easily have embodied an imaginary muse for Wim Wenders or myself: When Ganz stood wondering and eyes wandering, I managed to see what I thought he saw: He dreamed: I dreamed: Like an angel in flight: My wings alit into newly discovered adventures: I discovered: The film Wings of Desire is one of many reminders; something more is there:

It is my nature to realize my captures are not merely a landing but an investigation: I land from towering heights: My eyes rise towards heights unknown: Light shifts: Images change: My mind shifts: The images shifts: My mind engages: My mind disseminates a catalog of the entire visual world: It is like a million floaters swimming in my eyes: I merely need to harness the truth in my captures, my dreams: How else can I engage vantages: 

Desire is a powerful drug: I need to fly: I need to spread what wings I have left: My desires make frames that matter still: I inject a daily dose of flight desiring to make dreams in my eyes:

I have stood before the some of the tallest buildings on earth: I have stood atop some of the tallest building on earth: The measure of flight descending and ascending is dizzying: It is a manner of scoping out needs before I capture: I manner scoping: Then ask, what needs to be taken, if at all:

Architect: Renzo Piano: The New New York Time Building: New York City

Why not pursue what my eyes may see as if I was back in time: The 1932 Skyscraper Soulscomes to mind: A story almost one hundred years before Megalopolis: Though different yet akin to the nature of birth and rebirth in cities: So much on the line: A treble of brilliance in the air: The entire built environment from the ancient to the moment rests before me: I see my voice: I hear my pictures:

The history my eyes have seen is slowly disappearing: Everyday I begin again: I search for new history and new encounters that feel like my “first”: Then I begin again. It is as if I am accompanying Marianne Faithfull through natures’ conveyor of pollinator gardens: Britain’s long winding Ridgeway trackway takes us away and returns us to a place to begin again: Marianne’s later rasp is whispered: A couple of  Beatles  whistle “ The Long and Winding Road”: Around we go: To and fro my camera lives in the past, present and willingly, futures: My youthful exuberances mastermind my visual life in photography.

Tokyo from Architect Kengo Kuma’s Asakusa Culture Tourist Information Center

So many movies, book titles and songs create a harmonious mind centered archive: It becomes a gateway to something better: The reminder of the pleasures recharged my electrolytes: My irises brighten: Songs are heard: Celluloid captures: Scribbling continues: Discovery for a few moments is ahead:

Sometimes secrets are not seen: We miss capturing secrets: We make up stories about the ones that got away: The capture not made: I have missed seasonal moons, chiaroscuro sunlight married into shadows: I have missed my cities covered in dappling light: I have not taken certain risks: I will never come to terms with what is in my rear view but should have been caught: Snippety-snap-snap must always be heard: A pause can be deadly, a capture should be celebrated:

If something is there to be photographed, there is a reason. There is majesty in every frame, unless you pause to consider: My mind often takes a walk with  the late great photographer August Sander: He saw a united family in almost every human life: I see the mere make up of a city: It is a unity of our planet built: It is a family of figures I dream to capture. The movie title Make Way for Tomorrow comes to mind:

New York: 275 Madison Avenue: Johns-Manville Building : Architect: Kenneth Franzheim

Architecture of Cities: Tales and Fantasy

New York

The sounds of cities and calendar seasons change: Our hearts remain the same: Birds flock: Heart’s pulse: Colors abound: Each day the camera awakens to a curious why: Why this day matters before tomorrow and more than before.

Funny thing about the sounds of urban humanity: The cities I have traveled to and from marry certain forms of sound in and out of an inner sanctum, a triad of auditory connectivity:Cochela, Pinna, and the Tympanic Membrane.

Triads appears in many forms: Not least my photography: There are always new and better ways to make captures: I lean towards the marriage of  aperture, shutter speed and iso: Some hear automatically while snapping: My photographs are a decisive consciousness with mechanical and emotional applications: I need the “i’s” to matter: I need instinctive, involuntary and impulsive on all cylinders: There is only one way that happens: One mind one thought, the eyes and ears share it: It is sensory magic betrothed: Engaged, my eyes discover: I never merely press the camera to “action”: I listen to the sounds I am capturing:

Barcelona capture

Naming cities I have traveled to is like christening the three-hundred and sixty-one stones in the game Go: I like to remember but it is difficult: My memory valve gets a bit hazy from time to time: Dubai, Los Angeles, Delhi, Bangladesh, Barcelona, Paris come to mind: But moments are moments: Sometimes they represent cities and sometimes a mere “hello”: My entire catalog has many moments, many captures and many hellos: 

When you are racing a car, passing in a train, flying between countries and continents you unwittingly forget steps taken: It is not that the numerous is too much to remember: It is that the mind is in such a hurry to recount there is an unaccountable blockage.There is a pattern to what I do and see: Being alive in nature may feel simultaneously random and deliberate: There is the sound that is there but not seen: Alerted, the triads mentioned above move into action: There is a glance: I begin a search for captures: This is not how I see what I may think: IAm ust an explorer with a single frame capture in mind: Imagine a trek back into the woods: Imagine a trek back into the Great Basin Desert: There is no veld(t): There is only grand spaces for ideas to unfold: A mere positioning of my lens: My world churns vision into mind: Mind into vision: I espy a footprint of a built environment: My electrolytes punch in overdrive: I become equally reckless and mannered: I shoot to see, I shoot to capture and begin again:There are no imaginary ramparts in front or behind to dissuade me from making what I need.Animal droppings in some circles is a sign of fortunes or something more ahead: I collect the leads noting patterns of discovery: It is like seeing hieroglyphics embedded on a mirror facing you and behind: A collection of mysteries ahead and behind to decipher: Ahead and beyond remain imaginary:The ears hear a city:

Tokyo: Chiyoda- Hitotsubashi

Imagine the unnatural convergence of two ideas: Drink from the imaginations of Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away” and Henry Roth’s “Call it Sleep”: Imagine their  ideas nested in an ideal of a dream: Animated realities living in realities animated frame: Such an enlivened cushion could be stories realized but not yet told not yet seen:I have an overactive animated view of my own reality: My camera has always been lured to the expansive but intimate narratives: Fantasy about adventure and the entrée into the conflicts of terrors and horrors, delights and tormented struggles is a pretty complicated way to observe the cities and the homes atop our planet:Henry Roth’s “Call it Sleep” had it right: How beautiful it must be to witness in real time the struggle you thought you knew; thought you saw: I read the above drama, my mind imagines a focal length that captures, invites, discourse and pleasures:While gazing uninterrupted at the screen, my mind  languishly resolves to inhabit another world, narrative: Miyazaki’s animated, “Spirited Away seemed to take the freedom and life of captures into an alternate universe: I floated in celluloid: I bathed in Miyazaki’s fantasy’s frames: like “Call it Sleep” it is the intimacy of the individual, the author’s powers of perception that I celebrate: Both Roth and Miyazaki (among one million others) enjoin and enhance my, mine only, panoptic view; if only for one day:The cities I see, I feel: The interior urbanism lives are filled with steadfast passions: My camera celebrates an ideal way to dream: I should breathe in and settle for a few days of hula hoop among my Quokka friends and delight in the pleasures heard in my captures.

jűrgen Mayer Architect: The Metropolitan Parasol in Sevilla, Spain