Architecture of Cities: Two Places as One

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:

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:

 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: