Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty IX

“Come a little closer
Hear what I have to say,“
“When we were strangers
I watched you from afar,”

– Neil Young

A Diamond to Touch: The intersection of seeing and touching a moment:

I stand alone: My mind inside my eyes: Camera in hand; I dance; I dance something differently; I mimic a bit of the old “soft shoe”- – not Astaire, more Chaplin with a lilt in my gait: The moment is happily zany: I defeat life’s heinous nightmares: I listen beyond the moment: The city awaits:

I wander: My mind wanders: I pace down alleyways, darkened streets and across prairie lands: There is always a better view: So many people, so many animals, so much natural life and never enough:

Photography is more than a moment: Photography is sort of an amber shade of nirvana: Nirvana is merely an extreme destination to re-invent a comfort factor: a pillowed fusion where I can see as much as I need to rest my eyes: The city awaits.

I bend from a great height to something less below; The pose textured like a euphoric hallucinogenic. Imagine moving to pet a black panther- – or bend to kiss a rose. Fangs and thorns will never appear- -euphoria remains: Reality raises its eyes: Architecture enjoins both reality and euphoria- -The visual experience tactility remains: The touch; stones, metals and more become a tactile textured memory in my hands:

Sometimes I am like a starving raptor standing alone, anticipating a near to be – – capture: Today I am begging to imagine a tomorrow, find a new gear to advance the identity in my pictures: “What does the Hope Diamond feel like”. If I cannot feel, I can dream. Geerat Vermeij, the blind evolutionary biologist, (whom I have photographed) taught me that: He educated and reminded me that as he once stood on the shore of a new found coastline- – almost anything he could imagine, may be real.

Those who can not get close but insert their eyes into the materials of beauty are a rare breed: To be transported through time by the simplicity of a caressing a new found object of beauty? I can just about hear Keats: “Ode…”: I imagine what the experience must make for the photograph about to be… I with a bit of a wisp in hand touch not Egypt, Brazil and continents- – I touch what Vasari may have written about- -the materials that Brunelleschi, da Vinci, and later Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer summoned towards their destiny’s.

My 365 days begin with innate visual understanding,  imagine my camera sees. Massive illusions pose and posture in my cities: The photographs about to be realized- -shape shift before I see what I beg to touch:

My days begin and end with camera in tow:  The high bar is seen raised daily possibly because of a man named- – Marcel Proust . “In Search of Lost Time” or “Remembrance of Things Past”, whichever you prefer has always compelled or forced (whichever you prefer) to guide my eyes to more than I can fathomly see: I round the cities on all sorts of wheels hoping to either see more or merely stand before: I am equally calm and pleading:

I make a photograph today to share tomorrow- -tomorrow I share the photograph about my yesterday: My past was …: If you may imagine- – has seen decades, centuries and millenniums. They are not mine, but… partially Proust’s. They are frames from what remains- -my days and before: They are my illogical life and  death …I try to search for new and remember old frames from when…Every frame I have captured is uniquely hinged to a beautiful daily demise, but mine.