A Temple turned to rubble: 58-60 Rivington Street: The former oldest Temple in New York
The unnerving quietude in mystery—September 11th, 2001 hosted a brilliant morning light,--, a brilliant sky. Quiet went on alert: Quiet is when your pets perked ears are like sirens not heard: Quiet is a place where my dreams live: Quiet is a perception of reality about to be heard: Quiet is an overture to all of my tomorrows: Every morning seems the same: I wake up: I check my calendar: A bit of coffee: Something arranged for the day(s). I try to capture something three-hundred and sixty-five days a year: A volcanic interruption is all that might interrupt the flow:
The walls were not moving: Traffic seemed still: Something was too quiet: I tuned into my television: I saw the second plane hit the World Trade Center: The noise that followed was silent: The noise was never real:
I gathered my camera on my balcony: I kept looking down to the streets as I did when I first skydived: The balcony was not falling: I landed onto my streets: I walked towards the smoke: I could barely make out street signs: I walked until my lungs knew better. The streets lead me to the silent site:
WTC: What became after 9/11
I returned home: Freeze framed the soul:
I stood into the evening darkness leaning into my balcony window: I watched assorted vehicles with windows shrouded in black drive past: My imagination challenged: I knew but imagined bodies in those windows: The transportation never stopped: I never moved: I never blinked: The last and final gaze saw a yellow school bus- -
My camera never moved: The purpose of framing horror could not be framed in my mind: Maybe minutes or hours passed- -certainly days: Now it is shy of twenty-four years and I can reprint the image across my eyes faster than a Red-tailed Comet hummingbird flaps its wings: The haunting lives: The capture remains in my mind’s time- -every breath that whispers.
Time passed: Architect Richard Meier included me in the al corrente collective: Eisenman, Gwathmey, Holl, Vinoly, Isozaki, Schwartz, Diller, Scofidio, Tod Williams and the New York Times Architecture critic/organizer-Herbert Muschamp. More groups and gatherings would later include Shigeru Ban, Ken Smith, Libeskind, Foster, Childs:
I snapped most of the teams in their search for plans and progress: I returned daily to capture the planning stages as if a military strategic war room was secretly deciding our nations future: I was invited to record the captures of the participants planning: I was a pretty large fly on the wall that nobody paid attention to: The universe seemed to expand into a congregation of like minded and not so like minded participants: I was reminded of Raymond Burr coordinating the attack on Godzilla: The best and brightest gathered to counter the catastrophe:
Most photographers keep an elfin influence somewhere atop their shoulders: Close enough to whisper inspirations into their ears: I almost always had American Civil War photographer Mathew Brady near: He choreographed so many captures not merely for the times: He made images he thought society might want to see this day in twenty-twenty-five and the almost one-hundred and fifty years from his initial captures:
The tallest residential Building in New York City by SHOP
The very day I encountered the “site I claimed the tragedy of the grotesque: I will remember it always: The days that impacted my camera’s eyes never truly remember, but do: I play every scene from my initial captures to include my nightmares and horrors that others have lived:
I have replayed the anthem my camera has undertaken: It begins with an audible from the metronome in my ears: The yellow school bus passes in my every nightmare: I imagine I begin to a period of adjustment: I stand from this street and that corner with a promise, promised: I will record as in my elfin Mathew Brady- -From my initial capture until there is no more- - cities and more will become captures for not this day but those tomorrow:
As if accompanied by an army of hazel-eyed irises: The woodwinds gather: El-CID as in cinema’s Charlton Heston’s plays before my eyes: Miles Davis as in Miles Davis plays to the march: The Gabriel Garcia Marquez Tramontana melds with nature’s Aurora borealis: The accompaniment of inspirations challenge the lens to see the cities as I might imagine them- -and as I need to expose the streets beyond a mere today.
Christian Portzamparc’s One57