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.

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.