Architecture of Cities: Interior Dreams

New York Public Library.

I find a human bone: I imagine a skeletal remain: My picture might begin: History stops time: My history makes the time I live in: Every picture is meant to see the snap that lives beyond today: I marry most natural sciences into a single engagement: I examine what poses before me: Generational experiences accompany my photography: My imaginations have value: I am learning to see: I need to  explore moments: What becomes our history will be a mystery.

I imagine real time in faux speed: Imagine the Las Vegas Sphere: Imagine a single switch can stop time: A planetarium’s eyes site warp speeds on infinite galaxies: Imagine: Oh, to be a snail in fluids  of consciousness streams:

I am pillowed in the shell of a snail: I move as if I am running: I am almost never running: My interior mind glossed in the riches of mother-of-pearl pools: It is an oasis where I can hide in plain sight: I attempt to examine the beauty that are my captures to be: My mind is in a hurry to be somewhere: My mind slows as in a snails shell to see: The beauty and rapture I capture are frozen moments captured in reflection: Comforted and glowing my mind awaits:

St. Nicholas National Shrine; Architect Santiago Calatrava New York City.

I understand sanctuaries are not safe: We as in “all of us” cannot live in a cocoon where silence lives: Cameras need to explore beyond the comfort zones:

What would I do if a unique union of legions’ legends of Roman Praetorian Guards arrived before I successfully explored: I may have  missed all that has been built: The built environment has to be seen if it is offered: A real world of fantasy might await: My mind’s home becomes an architectural investigation: It is where I seem to live: Legions of Praetorian Guards approach.

A panoramic view of my visual world awaits: I am at a snails pace: I near my private glory.

I may be Kafka’s Gregor in Metamorphosis: In plain sight I am seen and I see: A snail is merely a snail that not a soul sees: My visual luxuries become mine: I am alone with a view to be seen: My own orb, is a gloss of an interior snails’ shell: A home with a  secret way of seeing:

Inside Heron Tower by KPF, gazing at Norman Foster’s 30 St Mary Axe ( The Gherkin) in London.

Interiors are mere shells of worlds we don’t see: They are our mother-of-pearls in some dreams: I see not with a pair of eyes: I see with recognition: I am never certain, what may be, what may become if you allow: The interiors of architecture are rarely acknowledged. I need to claim them for my cameras:

Towards my end I may sit as Kafka’s Gregor: My time will pass from view:  Most built designs might vanish as well: I remind my life: I am alone:  My eyes are confined in a dream: The dream may be real: My eyes espy millimeters: I make pictures that are almost pure: My mind may be sage: The sage for how life lives in the three tenses of time: The passages of time:

I am like most people: I live between what might be and what will be:

I am not Tennyson nor Ulysses: But I as a snail pillowed in confines such as iridescent lush of mother-of-pearl, I “…strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”.

I often recall my conversations I have with my eyes: It is never lonely: It is why so many decades moving forward I am rewarded with each capture: I hear the voices that structure my steps and my cameras’ settings: If I am to imagine what my past had been: I may imagine what my future may be: Is there a better way than through my twenty-millimeter-my forty-five-millimeter?

Nothing is better focused than a dream through a lens.

Snohetta inhabiting Philip Johnson in AT&T Building New York City.

Richard Schulman is a photographer and writer. His books include Portraits of the New Architecture and Oxymoron & Pleonasmus. He lives in New York City.