#Cesar Pelli’s #PacificDesignCenter Detail #Los Angeles
#MartinPuryear
The truth lies in the experience. Once your eyes vanish into history’s mirror, you will never see the world as you once knew it.
For many years I felt like I was dancing off a Brownstone stoop like the photographer Helen Levitt’s masked children. I was alive and anonymous with camera in hand. The “Whole Earth Catalog” and the universe it revealed between covers was my world. Everything that was here, there and everywhere was a magnet to my lens. But then, like a symptom of “Sleep Apnea” my world froze. In one of life’s infinitesimal hellos, I realized what about photography mattered. I was seized, and motionless by objects to behold. The deepest imaginable inhale placed me seconds from faint. My camera goes “snippety snap snap snap”. The “snap” can change your life forever.
Thousands of designed objects that measure our world history have held my gaze for almost one half century. My camera affixed to my hand, I stand eyes awaiting, adjacent to Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall in the rain. I stood elbow to elbow with many Oscar Niemeyer’s and Zaha Hadid’s. I drugged every living electrolyte in my body as I married my mind to Louis Kahn’s Bangladesh National Parliament. I ran naked around an industrial warehouse in Shenzhen, China. My heart paused in London one day while inexplicably witnessing the best designs by Ross Lovegrove, Ron Arad and Marc Newson. The camera lingers near the Architect Cesar Pelli eyes. He wondered what I might do with his Pacific Design Center. Every architect is cautiously curious to see what my lens might see.
Every single moment alone with my objective camera is my experience that marries my eyes to my past, present and future visual endeavors. The lessons learned from my deep water dive into my archives are that my photographs unbeknownst to me are immersive in design. Thousands of eyes pose for me. Thousands of places await the “snap”. From portraits, to architecture and anything realized with my camera is about design.
It is truly scary to know that your brain has independent functions: one oblivious to others. That moment when you realize that you were not merely photographing China, Turkey, Bangladesh, India, France, Italy or America. I was photographing every standing object in optical arms length.
Somehow I think my visual agenda was initiated by some sort of dance with psilocybin and the written word. The literary quadrants that inhabit my mind have clearly influenced my brains intersections; Tolstoy intersected with Hemingway; Flannery O’Connor intersected with Edna O’ Brien; Gore Vidal intersected with Christopher Hitchens; Geoff Dyer intersected with Walter Benjamin, and Joan Didion intersected with everyone. Every image I have made is inevitably connected to the existing quadrants, to my past and what the future holds.
The moment I realized Neil Degrasse Tyson and Richard Schulman were on the same wavelength: (Neil wrote about “Thinking about objects through time”). He mentioned the Brazilian capuchin monkeys making tools. My mind flipped to “2001 Space Odyssey”: One troop of monkeys attacked another with weapons that were bones. I couldn’t help think about the simplicity and history of tools as objects of design. I must have thought about Neil Degrasse Tyson’s essay while being airlifted into the clouds above Brazil?
We all wonder where we came from, where it all started. I always suggest Walter Benjamin’s “Arcades”. My images reflect his stroll, his memory as flaneur visiting galleries that have disappeared but once held a reflection via mirrors of windows into a history; a history that only exists in books, art and design.
My heart breaks when I feel constrained, when I realize I can’t expose all of my eighty-thousand images in one grand narrative. My heroes, Fenton, Marville, Brassai, Brandt, Koudelka and and and Also designed their imagery. So I follow in the line of two hundred and fifty years.
The bearded Capuchin paved the way for design, and image makers like myself just let the camera go snippety snap snap snap.
#Shenzhen #China #Industrial #warehouse
#MARCJACOBS #Jaklitsch #Gardner #Architects #Tokyo
#RENZOPIANO #TheShard #London
#DonaldJudd #Art