The Crossroads gazing west over Manhattan
Jonathon Swift wrote: “Vision is the art of seeing things invisible”. The invisible sometimes vanishes before we are aware of what has passed: How does it feel to seek what is no longer- -I imagine the unimaginable.
I soothe the anxious when I dream: If I imagined Antonio Salieri fraught with envy- -Might I hear somewhere near the clavichord tickled by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: The invisible- -vanished: If I imagined standing afar from the island of Elba- - How might I imagine the exiled Emperor Napoleon gazing towards his empire: The invisible- -vanished: If I imagined standing near the institutionalized jazz musician Art Pepper- -Might I imagine Pepper’s absorbing atmospheric scribbles in gouache suggesting Dali’s and Gaudi’s: The invisible- -vanished:
If I imagined Herman Melville scribing Moby Dick- - Might I imagine the White Whale swallowing Ahab’s horror-stricken shipmates- -: The invisible- -vanished: If I am allowed to dream- -might I stand alone naked imagining the truths that live in all of the above?
Not a day not a shadow of light passes where nor when my camera begs for something to become: Vivid dreams may live in realities or asylums: Quests, real and imagined stand ahead: I saunter forward for the encountered memories: The architecture of my cities and cities not yet met await: Elba’s Portoferraio, Vienna, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Port Lligat all and more beguiled my eyes:
Architect: Thomas Heatherwick: Hudson Yards: New York City
My entire collected archives await and invite the new imageries, new places, new lives: Together they form an emboldened front of history past and history to become: The images, their voices, quaint and anthropomorphic are like a chamber of choruses staying the course: They thank me for my captures: My past is their past: My life is their life: We cohabitate legally:
The invisible that my camera realizes is vanishing before I can breathe like fog in the nights’ morning - - “poof”. Cities filled with architecture are like Russian Nesting Dolls: It is easy to imagine each and everyone suffocating my imagination: I align my eyes with the spirit that leeches Freud’s “ID”: Instead of suffocation I feel the freedom and the impulsive to capture the pleasures that are built before I arrived and before my history:
Crossroads are about ideas that we pass through- -to get to the other side: The camera imagines cities of architecture, architecture of cities awaiting my decisions to pose and capture: I am merely passing through in frame and imagination- -again and again.
Architect: Santiago Calatrava: The Oculus: New York City
My dreams assimilate into alternative universes: When I am in the space of others the ideas I imagine embark into celluloid and print: I hear voices urging my camera to react: The eyes of others are not mine- -Yet magically the inspiration that others compel me to breathe become my captures- -if only imagined:
I remember standing in front of a movie screen watching Paris, Texas: I needed to get closer to the empty quietude: Homer’s Odyssey was my home for many hours until the thrill of being closer to his universe became mine: The day the poet Percy Shelley died at sea every nightmare I could conjure magically appeared across the Ligurian Sea: I died and thrived wading aside and near remains:
The components that make compositions are observed in the above three vivid fractions of time: My camera saw light and power: The personality of light posed before my eyes: Photography took flight- - My photography took flight:
Out of breathe and eyes aflame my camera began to see all of my histories and those of others as one- -posed as if in flight. My eyes filled with dreams mannered, my cities of architecture almost through osmosis became my brotherhood of ideas.
Kings Cross Train Station: London, England: Architect John McAslan + Partners