Urban Architecture: The Beauty of Mapping XXVIII

true fiction

I loved three paintings in my life: I admired many more paintings: The three paintings I loved subliminally framed my photographic ideas – true fiction followed: Arnold Böcklin’s first island of the dead It told my eyes (along with two other paintings/artists) what my photo needed to look like. The three pictures were like my first understanding that life begins with a fetus. Three paintings became my DNA before I realized what I wanted from the life of a photographer and not just from photography. A photographer’s life was about how and where I made pictures: where and why I traveled: the collective immersion of place and time: the pragmatism and adventurism I wanted found on celluloid: the invention that gave character to what the camera saw.

Every day became a séance-like dream sequence: I imagined traveling through the lost Apacheria of the Apache Indians: I imagined standing upright to the sounds of Tate/Manson’s Los Angeles nightmare: I imagined the sight of Vesuvius’s lava flows at Pompeii for the first time: Well, if you allow yourself to imagine somewhere before you come here or there – reality raises its beautiful head. A dangerous and fun experience becomes a visual comfort.

The visual comfort that I first recognized in Böcklin’s work. island of the dead That was the necessary image technique that I wanted to aim for: I tried to blend technology and journey: it would be like a diary of a monarch butterfly’s migration: if you only admire the wings in motion, you can write a million words about the urgency of flight, the joy at the destination and the experience of capture: I wanted to take part in the flight: I wanted to be part of the phenomenon called kaleidoscope, to be part of the fluttering of wings.

For decades, I didn’t just click the shutter on my camera. -I was somewhere> That somewhere always reminded me of Böcklin’s “…dead”. Romance and travel were certainly more important than capture – until the opposite became the greater truth.

Every home I saw through its wide and narrow openings became my own personal romance novel. Stories are not just about captured moments, they are about where we have been.

In my heart is a place where I am never alone: That is why these three paintings are with me: There is no fabrication in this set of concepts: comparable to Melville’s Ahab or Albrecht Dürer’s whale: there is a quest for reality: there is no time to die in the imagination: a quest to capture the experience of a lifetime in flight: a minute in the torrent of Celtic mythology: listen to Homer’s joyful siren: Standing toe-to-toe with Rabelais’ Gargantua: While I am alone in my mind with Böcklin’s “…Dead,” my reality is seen as a framework of designs by Oscar Niemeyer, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ricardo Bofill, and Philip Johnson, and over 100,000 actual moments. I stand across a thousand cities, just listening to the conversations of the ghosts who have been here.