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

Architecture in Cities: My Possum, My Opossum: The Art of Light Nobody Sees

Architect: Zaha Hadid: London Aquatics Centre

My Possum my Opossum:

Interchangeable in name and then: Buildings shine the same: Architecture is created and resolved similarly: They are categorically different but the same: Vastly different like Possum and Opossum, the words somehow germinated in some circles into one: Certainly the notion that they are interchangeable is false: Sometimes language unfortunately manifests a merger of convenience: 

Photographer Lee Miller and artist Gordon Matta-Clark imagine if; they stood side by side: My mind would have seen them like a possum mating an opossum: Maybe it was the other way around? It matters, but no matter: Their realities are so different yet similarities abound:

Miller’s picture of a bullet hole in the window pauses my inhales: The WW11 war torn landscape awakens fears of hell in my eyes: Gordon  Matta-Clark’s sledgehammer bludgeoned building walls across war torn New York City’s, “The Bronx”. The numerous buildings across the Bronx urban landscape: A world war frightened a planet: Clark created fright and fraught within urban decay: Miller captured in a single frame and more the same: Their dark might need context and reflection: The shadows of a planet the shadows of a city: A tiny window of a world’s travesty: A tiny window of a city’s…: One man’s Possum is another’s Opossum sometimes:

Architect: Thom Mayne: 41 Cooper Square, Cooper Union School of Architecture New York City

I often stand before and beyond a phalanx of towers: There are images, resting, hidden: Works of architectural designs fascinating a city’s landscape: The lure of we cant see or have is powerful: Sometimes because either we are shut off from them: Sometimes because spaces and places are unreachable: We often hope and imagine something enchanting may be ahead or behind: Something more or less than expected may be ahead or behind: There is an entire universe that has no view of what we see as we see it: If we see it:

The present and the past stand before the focal length: “Snippety-snap-snap”, certainly before all of what we may see what we think we see; vanishes:

The architectural designer‘s needs and intentions need to be seen through my camera format: Buildings are aware they may perish: Our eyes retain the buildings’ memory and our memories before those moments: Maybe something new will proclaim the future: And the camera begins again.

Architect: Thom Mayne: Diamond Ranch High School: Diamond Bar California

If one building stood before me for three-hundred and sixty-five days: Maybe I could shoot some thousands of “takes”: it would be like making a movie: “Action” is heard and I imagine rounding up all of the angles into a single “reflex”. It is what the camera is meant to do: The question is how to see it best. Allow it to become a single inhale followed by a whispering exhale: The title of David Halberstam’s The Best and Brightest, invokes my camera’s needs: The light, the best light and the brightest aperture!

Like Possums/Opossums we hide in plain sight; we stand in the shadows made by light; maybe a shadow of our own making; everybody you think is looking; they are not: We shoot.

Sometimes  the capture is like sparklers raining from the sky: Something captured seems to alight our eyes: The memory is to feel alive: It is a temporal life filled with multiplying constellations in our eyes, our future: More glittering stars above please:

How will my eyes be drawn to what we think we see: The enormous universe remains alive: What a way to see where I once stood where I think I might stand to see again.

Architect: Zaha Hadid: 520 West 28th Street: New York City

Architecture in Cities: Los Angeles Fires Inspire Memory and Lament: Traveling in time: We all must fall: But we all must rise again and again

Memory

There is a silence to be discovered in the lives of others: There is a private window into worlds seen and unseen: The silence we see and the silence we don’t hear prevails in our everyday:

Marcel Proust and Walter Benjamin come to mind: Maybe Stephen King and one million writers beyond may be attributed as well: There are a trillion sentences and paragraphs that are spoken and not heard across the planet: The universe needs to be explored:

The Los Angeles fires of 2025 break my heart: Lives never known, lives of others vanish before we can know the depths of the individuals; the centuries that preceded us.

A city can be best understood through writers of life and lives that not only reveal but reveal fictional truths that we can find comfort in: The writers can entertain us with not only fact or fiction, but a vibe: A vibe is what allows you to close your eyes recounting the ways a writer has seduced you.

Dream

Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Joan Didion, Walter Mosley, Thomas Pynchon, Michael Connelly come to mind: Maybe one million more (to use a surfing phrase) might “Step into Liquid”: Live in the sublime and fascination; Narrate Los Angeles’s where, what, when: The vibe, the treble and the heart of a city, the heart of what we have never known or might never have seen.

Cinema also has accompanied my mind towards new adventures: The  navigational verve that  filmmakers have recorded and invented for us is an adventure into the vortex of our mind and earth: It has made for a glorious travel log: Somewhere between Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly and more take us directly into the vibe of period and place: Into those steps there are paths not taken: Ideas not understood: Lives seen and not seen.

I think about the fires’ as a way to mourn the loss of place but not memory: A celebratory memory singed with lament: I have crisscrossed the entire four-thousand Los Angeles County square miles: I know there was a time when going from Chatsworth to Venice; Malibu to Pasadena was all in a days’ work: I was photographing: People, places and dreams; My navigation was plotted by a protractor and  compass dancing over my head like Merlin’s children: I scurried across freeways and roads: Some and possibly most never to be seen again:

memory

There is no capture without realities’ dreams leading the way: People and places are guiding lights: The “Original Pantry, The Griffith Park Observatory, Pandora’s Box, Hollywood sign, Manson murder sight, Watts Tower, Randy’s Donuts and Dolores del Rio’s home: They are frames that live in my depository of archives: Accompanied by  thousands more: The small and large transparency formats: The David Hockney, Richard Diebenkorn, Frank Gehry, Getty Villa and Center: They cozy up to my Pacific Coast canyons Hollywood canyons from highest peaks to Los Angeles’s ocean levels: Every enclave from one end of the city to another has been seen, but for what gain: China Town, Little Tokyo, Korea Town, Olvera Street remind me I have lived a never ending adventure: What was I seeking? Nothing more than a capture:

I feel the fire: Malibu County Line: Patricks’ Roadhouse down the road: Estrada Drive heads partially  north, east and west: Rustic Canyon cuts back north and west to Chautauqua: I came upon Temescal Canyon and Paradise Cove: I traced more miles to Calabasas, Mulholland Drive and  Cahuenga Pass:

I can be like a AAA map guide becoming lost at every bend in the river: How else can I trace my eyes’ heart: I travel to find myself lost and find my self discovered: The fires are non penetrate but the heat remains alive: The sorrow I feel for every last footprint amid the fires leaves me distraught with the what if’s: The digging into all of the land and lives lost makes me feel for the centuries never to be saved:

For a fleeting few seconds as I rode down Estrada I felt like  like William Wharton’s Birdy: My 1971 Moto Guzzi was a real dream: I imagined flight: My arms spread wide: My eyes caught Jack Nicholson joy dancing in the middle of Estrada: He was running across Estrada appearing part the Penguin, and part small time alcoholic lawyer from Easy Rider: He seemed sated with joy:

I chose not to fly further than here: I will always be sad about the January fires: James Baldwin wrote: ”people are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them”.

Los Angeles

Architecture in Cities: Color and Light into Pictures of Cities

One Madison Ave

I stood half naked: I tippy-toed just over four-feet tall. I was mostly six years removed from the womb: The spectral of the candy colored skies angled above:

The blue whale appeared resolute in its pose: The whale was still, quiet, dead: I imagined  almost alive: Her large eye looked me up and down: My imagination dithered: The summer blaze begged me to get a bit closer: The shade and shadows of the 60, 70, 80, 90 foot behemoth, posed: The whales’ vapors moved about: 

I had heard a rumor: A family of Pika’s had lost their way: I fused all of my young imagination into one thought: The blue whale most likely circled the seas for quite sometime: She espied a Pika  family ashore on  a tiny embankment: She might have been blinded by sunlight reflecting like a mirror on the Pacific: The Pika and embankment turned out to be a mirage: The huge mammal obviously lost its way: It skidded atop the shoreline in Southern California: My uneducated guess is explained: The Seven Seas can be a dangerous place.

House of the Oscar: Los Angeles

The California amusement park, P.O.P ( Pacific Ocean Park) stood a few dozen feet south: Dozens of wooden piles held the pier aloft: Screaming children and rumbling rides filled the air: I listened: I now know the whale and eventually the park would die an unceremonious death: The juxtaposition between the whale and the wailing voices saddened the moment: The noise and the quiet death of the whale was deafening. If there is only one way to define “an innocent”, just maybe that day was mine.

11 Madison Ave: New York

Yes she was dead: I am less than one hundred years of age and more than ten: I have remembered that incident as if I remembered even the time of death: The  entirety of my camera life has been reliving experiences of my own defining synesthesia: The very first time I touched the sky, I saw the colors that my camera might see: The very hallucinatory moment is about touching colors with music, music becoming colors: touching the colors of the sky with a bit of music: Experiencing synesthesia seems to live in my every snap. If you might imagine Keith Richard’s Gimme Shelter just above me in the sky with a bit of treble: If you might imagine Jimmy Page’s first notes from Going to California: If you might imagine them as dueling guitars as in Deliverances’ “Dueling Banjos”: Maybe then my visual life makes sense: 

From the moment my whale lifted her underbelly, my mind merged her currents of yellow diatoms and blue base to every color I have ever opened my camera to: I imagined her dipping into the waves back to her Seven Seas: I imagined all the colors of the sun’s prismatic glow in a single frame: 

I imagined the blue whale for an instant dreamed that she would be back with the seafaring pod: I imagined she dreamed as death stood near by: Her underbelly again appeared like a current of yellow diatoms breaking through the waves out to sea: It was not psychotic chaos: It was not an angelic caress: I imagined I heard her plea: It is the way I see what I hear: She faced death: I was young: When I remember this moment my camera lines brighten and then I snap.

Rem Koolhaas Architect: Rothschild London City HQ: “New Court

Architecture of Cities: Birds of Prey, Birds of a Feather

Norman Foster: Hearst Tower: New York City

My eyes torn: Ruptured celluloid sprockets play before my mind’s eyes like a repeating life in retreat:

Decades of days before are no longer mine: My mind is reduced to the days no longer mine and a mere few days ahead:

To come:

It is a remarkable reckoning when you realize the embers of generations before are fading:

I unwittingly rewind the adventures had: Adventures not had may become adventures to be:

My mind’s eyes have guided me through stories not told and blindnesses not yet near:

I have seen the summation of my camera’s life: I have seen what the natural days, natural life has left behind me: What might be ahead: A dream in rewind: I imagine maybe be before there are no more:

Every single day has become a deciphering reckoning with a quantum variable of truths:

Richard Rogers: Lloyds of London

I have glimpsed into not merely the minds of others: I have glimpsed into the narratives of decades of an entire framed collective: Simply asserted, it is the the mind’s of others that I seek: Remarkably, my imaginations fantasias appear to fleeting:

I imagined two birds enjoined by one feather: I imagined two birds from that feather caressing and challenging: Rainbows like feathers of many birds mingled: Under the guise of cloud cover a kaleidoscope of photography’s adventurous prisms come to life: I breathe hesitantly: I might die if everything above disappeared:

Everyday my camera life is colored by people and places I had previously photographed: My eyes unbeknownst to me have captured millenniums in a variety of my every moment: All things natural are fantasies:

Making myself speed up with the times is like becoming an ever evolving dance partner fromEx Machina: An AI slow dance mingling among birds of a feather, birds of prey: Everything that I need: My eyes become:

Different times and unlikely days I once shared with Sir Norman Foster, Sir Richard Rogers: They were two old friends that shared what could be in this twentieth-twenty-first century: They designed according to dreams none others had conceived of: Their mark on time past, present and future are immediately with us: Their minds are the ones I met almost three decades past:

Richard Rogers: The original Millennium Dome: Presently: The O2 Arena

They temporarily became my camera’s “birds of a feather”and “birds of prey”: Early on my guess is that they were enjoined at the hip as they made headway forward: My guess is that as birds of prey in pursuit of more their heads challenged for commissions and possibly butted heads: 

They became a cornerstone among others of how I see my days past and ahead: My camera does not live in any particular reality: My cameras’ see something that those  two birds above may appreciate: An F-stop that may freeze in time all of my architects: Maybe in particular the two birds above ( Foster and Rogers) contributed most ably to how I see: How I learned to see:

I have known the names of famed: Sometime ago I considered what it may be like to know the minds of those: Sometime ago I considered what my camera needed to see before I can no longer see:

Time took care of all of my inquiries and considerations: Time of course can massage most  misguided concerns: Maybe it is true that I am merely a page in a book somewhere:Brewer’s Dictionary, “Fables of History and Myth” seems most apt:

It is the aperture left wide open that embodies all of my stories, all of my dreams: Old ones in the past new ones ahead: Camera settings F/1 or F/1.2 appear to be most sufficient for my mind to process the decades that are behind me and the few er days ahead: The open aperture and wide  open glass greet every nuance of every day in the most welcoming fashion: An entire universe passes by ready to be seen and captured; my mind allows for all of the light that will become:

Norman Foster’ The Willis Building, London dances with Richard Roger’s Lloyd’s of London

Architecture of Cities: The Yellow Rolls-Royce and Philip Johnson

Philip Johnson in his Sculpture Gallery

The perch: It is a place where the eyes capture worlds colliding and dreams shaping: The perch is where my memories live: I listen to the eyes: The perch appears: Every dream becomes real for my camera:

My every, begins with the nightmarish possibilities assumed in both Rod Serling’s “A Kind Of Stopwatch” and “Ninety Years Without Slumbering”. When time stops, I am alone: Alone is when the shutter sounds loudest: Then there is almost everything Orwell: His “Road…” books: They begin and end with the paths to a place: The place where my camera may see again something: Every day the end may be near: Serling and Orwell complicate the pleasures my mind sees: What a dream that may be: Their end is not mine but embraced nevertheless: My end will be a final capture: My eyes gratefully realize there is today: 

I daily realize I am a dreamweaver: I became aware while watching Woody Allen’s movie Love and Death: In one train car, the preening rich Russians frolic: Across the train tracks, the peasants sit miserably in flickering fading lights: I inadvertently entered the minds of others: Observing minds of others  became a window into something more:

The Capital Grille Restaurant: Architect Philip Johnson

The Yellow Rolls-Royce movie is a nice story about people traveling through time like myself: My eyes see the history of mine and others in each frame: Across maybe a decade my eyes travel from England in remaining posh times: The story travels through the decade ahead: Through France, Italy, Yugoslavia amidst armed resistance and more: My imaginary moments are remembered along with famous cohorts of 1950’s and 1960’s: Rex Harrison, Jeanne Moreau, George C. Scott, Ingrid Bergman and more: Actors dramatizing era’s of yore with the yellow 1931 Phantom ll in tow:

The idea of feeling the visual impact of a world foreign to me is almost too delicious: A foreign world with foreign countries in foreign times ablaze across the celluloid screen is imprinted on the eyes forever: The importance of the cinematic moments compel me to embark on my own journeys: To capture what my camera may dream: Sans a yellow Rolls-Royce.

My everyday is about living in a cocoon waiting to be released: The fear remains everyday that I may not be released to capture: My eyes fading before I am free to see becomes a nightmare: Then I dream some more: I live in the fantasies created by cinema: I believe in every frame: I dream I was careening through Europe in a yellow Rolls-Royce.

My camera dips its toes into parallel universes: I see what my camera imagines in a glow of fantasia and the bracing realities of our everyday history: I am sure that is what makes picture taking so pleasurable: To awaken in a dream and to stroll in realities is quite the emotional ride: The ride of necessity:

The AT&T Building New York City":Architect Philip Johnson

The Yellow Rolls-Royce is a composite story through a decade of real fantasy’s: The very same decade a real life journey and adventure took place: Over the course of almost a decade the architect Philip Johnson ingratiated himself with Europe’s German vision: Bon Vivant, in various years he landed in a 1929 Packard convertible: 1930 A Cord-L convertible and the 1937 Cord B12: 

I often wondered about the mind of this architect: As I remembered dreaming of passengering in the “Rolls”; what if I sat side by side with the architect Philip Johnson: What if I was passengering in his posh, stylish moments of automobile design: What was the mind like in this American with a tad of German vision in his own dreamscape: What if in the moment I had been privy to the insight of his vision, dream,mind: What would my camera know to see: How would we merge our visions as he explored all architects, architecture and cultural agendas in single frame work:

The two separate universes of fact and fiction, imaginary and real are mine to imagine: Separate universes to allow my camera to run amok with cantilevered fantasies: The eyes travel(ed): The continent countryside and cities of another place and mind are mine: 

I have spent a career reckoning with where I take the camera to see what needs to be seen:

Philip Johnson once opened his Rolodex for me: He thought it was important that I meet Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Jean Nouvel, David Childs and more: I was invited to see worlds not known to me:

Everyday I twist my rubik’s cube anew as one would impress upon a lucky charm: I pray alongside my diving rod: Imaging what I might  I imagine in all universes parallel to mine: I have been living in dreams: It happens to be such a beautiful reality: The universes may belong to others: My camera belongs to my histories.

“The Lipstick Building: Architect Philip Johnson

Architecture of Cities: Two Captures

Architect: Brazilian Isay Weinfeld: New York: The Jardim 527 West 27th St: The automated garage

I dreamed of something mythical: I imagined a woman running atop her toes through the Florida Everglades: Hundreds of white lily pads bent into the winds: Two little white arms embraced  twenty-three black, white and red sixty-foot mangroves: Their “hats” adorned like women from the Gilded Age: Austere, poignant and necessary:

I imagined the girl’s eyes espying close ahead three dozen Amaryllis Dancing Queens: Close and near the Malaysian Reticulated Pythons swam ahead of the African Ball Pythons: The crocs’ eyes bulged below the surface: The denizens giggled just ahead: Equatorial currents had been spotted careening north: All eyes peaked into the Everglade’s sky: The end was insight: 

One day I imagined the ruins of the ancients: My eyes fluttering among the flickering lights:The outmoded Kodak slide carousel hiccuped image after image: The end of...is near: The end is never here nor…: All that I knew may be vanishing: My eyes continued:

Architect: Isay Weinfeld: The 4 Seasons Restaurant: New York City

Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi nestles inside a tiny corner of my cerebrum: I find the comfort in an imagined parallel life: Miller stood before the Hellenic archipelago as one might imagine a fortuitous escape among gods not seen, not known: A man dreamed of discovering adventure and a life not told: Henry stepped forth: This man’s world was altered for every day following: Miller’s eyes like a camera’s, revealed in words, lives with my every breath:

As I slept through many nights, rewinding The Night of the Hunter over and over like an unmistakable scratch on an record album: Robert Mitchum’s “Harry Powell” character might have been seeking the good in evil: His character was saddled on a horse sitting atop a ridge in the daylight’s end: Darkness was ahead as he descended away from the light: In my imaginary fashion, I sat on on the horse’s rear: My mind was begging to return to the light I could breathe in: Cosmic alternate universes battled in plain sight: The beauty of hell upon us was almost too desirous: Director Charles Laughton and Cinematographer Stanley Cortez created the most beautiful hell: Cinema’s most beautiful black and white is my ode to eternal cinematic wonders:

Architect: Isay Weinfeld: A Room With a View: The Jardim: New York

Ideas appear: I feel the mind’s eyes of Francis Ford Coppola: Apocalypse Now’s Willard and Kurtz come to mind as I enter all cities and a city: I am equally desirous and delusional: A search for answers lifted its eyes before mine: Everything I manifest is embedded in memories of the past and future tenses: It is a whirlwind of visuals that never play tricks but allow me to see more than might be there: Every moment begins with a new a focal length: I define what I am measuring for: I reimagine every dream I have ever met: I reimagine every dream that became mine: I reimagine every way I have celebrated ways to see: Then there is the photography: The reimagining from fantasy to reality: The reimagining of what my camera’s framing could be: I understand what is in view: Willard and Kurtz may vanish in the moment: I then snap:

Silhouettes, reflections and chiaroscuros’ remain ahead: I enter new destinations: I enter into the darkness of light: I compose photographs: I am finally secure: My dreams became my companions: My eyes flex: I can see: I bring the heart of everything above into a simple matter of speaking:

All that I have imagined: Every written word, every cinematic film frame, has become embedded into a single capture: It is something I never realize until the secret moment appears: The moment is alone: My awakening eyes are alone: My life’s constant awakenings have sculpted the visions my eyes rest with, rely on:

The day in play: I planted two feet: I crossed town: I headed east and west: Two destinations held two separate experiences: I was pressed to find captures that feel the same but describe one intention: To explore possibilities: 

Imagine to invoke Miller, and all the above play date cohorts into a single snap: Imagine to articulate in a bouquet of dreams how an architect might complete effortlessly the efforts of design: I have spent nearly a professional lifetime exploring each day not for  the answer but a path: My armies of influential voices remain: Like Man Rays’ Fifty Faces of Juliet, my mind remembers reimagining all of my yesterdays.

Architect: Isay Weinfeld: The 4 Seasons Restaurant New York

Architecture of Cities: Two-Lane Blacktop

Architect: Tadao Ando: Pulitzer Arts Foundation: St Louis

Imagine for thirteen seconds or thereabouts: Debussy’s Clair de lune: Miles Davis’ first three chords from Sketches of Spain: Led Zeppelin’s first chord from Stairway to Heaven: The musical overlay teases the reverberating echos in my ears: The virgin Screech Owls’ wings free fall amid the hurricanes’ ascension:

I recalled my introduction to Chaïm Soutine: He had sold multiple paintings to Alfred Barnes: He needed validation for his past and what lie ahead: He ran dressed as if the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Fantasia from Paris to Cap d’antibes: I imagined:

Arriving at the white sands: Soutine’s enervating journey flatlined: He caught sight of his benefactor and begged for something Barnes could not give him: Soutine wanted more: Soutine wanted creative answers that Barnes was not equipt to offer: Soutine accepted a non descript suggestion from Barnes: Soutine ran breathlessly back to Paris with nothing: Nothing that might matter:

Architect: Arata Isozaki: Sant Jordi Palace: Barcelona

Eleven elephants: Nine white albino pigmy orangutans: Seventeen Black Birds with white beaks: The other animals of equatorial jungles and seas follow: There was a hut at the end of the road: All of the above stepped inside delicately:

When my eyes have to think, I am consumed by voices: I dream of many: Sometimes my mind imagines: Something deductive scientific: Something compulsive: Something sweet and dreamy: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, George Simenon and Beatrix Potter play appropriate roles: Absurd and abstract? Then imagine standing alone on a two lane black top going nowhere and anywhere you would like it to: My eyes sit on a road: The road is a two lane highway facing in the directions of east and west: Maybe: Not sure if it matters as every road leads to discovery:

Most days I hear my breathing pause: An extremely invasive inhale signifies a pause: My mind never has a pause: I collect myself: I beg for anything sweet, prophetic and poetic: Michael Caine’s recitation of my Kipling’s “If” is heard somewhere: My mirrored reflection is seen almost naked as I recite T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land: Wrestling with every last moment of light: I see that I have lived an entire life in poetic reconnaissance: I have for more decades… been on a mission to see.

Architect: Arata Isozaki: MOCA Los Angeles

It is only a moment to remember: I pause:

The essence of most moments appear in held hands: Arata Isozaki saw the Guggenheim Rotunda as a place to commune with architectural adventure: We talked.

We greeted each other with held hands: His Tokyo studio library was room for a communing of two: Two minds of separate ages and unique identity shared what matters in architecture: I hardly remember what he shared: I do  remember everything: Most of my decades live in some corner of my mind: My thirty seconds with Arata Isozaki seem like forever:

I stood with Tadao in my New York studio for a mere hour: I stood with Tadao in front of his International Library of Children’s Literature,Tokyo: Did the improbable experiences from thirty seconds or three days collectively become a forever moment: Certainly two great aesthetic minds have enhanced my vision beyond recognition:

Soutine’s breathless, enervating, flailing flatline is consuming: I prefer to follow my eyes as they prance like mice and deer along my streets and strides: My every direction: My life framed in analog or digital is my tomorrow.

Cinema’s Two-Lane Blacktop is not great art: It does though remind me that the emptiness evident in horizons: The din of claustrophobia that may live in cities are among thousand of film moments and movements film movements  that emphatically influence my moments: My eyes: Never has an entire film been remembered: But imagine from an entire two or four hours of film, remains a purpose. Embossed across my eyes is something breathless: My purpose: My voyage across somewhere.

Architect: Tadao Ando: Inspired by Issey Miyake: 21-21 Design Sight: Tokyo