Architecture of Cities: Something Beautiful, Something Captured

Melding ideas in a single frame.

Three or maybe five Zebra Finch question the means to fornicate backwards:

Eleven black crows swayed anxiously: Costumed in magpie camouflage: The bevy of black crows royal personage awaited: Adorned in baby Chinese Panda markings; three almost large orcas oscillated with stunning propulsion: The whitened arctic icebergs stood frozen:

Our eyes see through our hearts: Or is it possibly our heart sees through our eyes:

The film Mephisto brings us the darkness from another time: Klaus Maria Brandauer lives through us: The film Apocalypse Now brings us the darkness from another time: Marlon Brando lives through us: The film  Perfect Days brings us the joy from another time: Koji Yakusho lives through us:

A brew of celluloid dressings in a stew: The crosswinds are near: So we wait. There is a spell on the horizon: So we wait: There is an emotional albatross ahead: My mind imagines, so we wait: Melding of ideas is dangerously beautiful: We wait:

United States Holocaust Memorial: Architect James Into Freed: Pei, Cobb and Freed.

I have not yet photographed the Obama Presidential Library: There is a story there: There are stories minted in Chicago’s Jackson Park: There are stories minted in Obama’s Presidency: The stories maybe true: Maybe the stories are not what they seem: I must capture what needs to be seen: Histories are evolving before our eyes: Irregular lives are ahead: Far or near life has an intended rollercoaster that illustrates almost everything: History can no longer afford to be missed:

My camera can no longer afford to miss history: My camera can no longer afford to skip a heart beat: To skip over even the smallest thought is to miss where the Hobbit was imagined: To imagine where an idea began is to imagine how my camera needs to capture the past in our futures:

I could never imagine to miss a natural fall from grace: I could never imagine how my camera would atone for missing anything: Our heart sees through our eyes: Our eyes see through through our heart:

Berlin Holocaust Memorial: Architect Peter Eisenman.

My eyes have not traveled one million miles to miss a thing of anything: I began by listening to the surface: I Passengered along California’s highway 395 mid-section for years: Baseball bats and spikes into the dirt touched the gloves of pastimes: I was reminded of the internment concentration of Japanese: I only heard about the games as a child: I never arrived at Manzanar: I suffered not from being alive in 1943: I suffered that I never arrived to see: I never wanted to  suffer the loss of future blindness:

Do you remember? She was one of those who would never admit that when an emotion was dead, the memory of the occasion was dead as well. He had to take her memories on trust, because she had always been a truthful woman.”

Graham Greene: A Burnt-Out Case

Our heart sees through our eyes: Our eyes see through through our heart: Memorials to past lives are dreams that tell stories unseen: To gallantly live among past deaths into their future is where tales begin: Our past is always our futures:

I was in The Illinois Holocaust Museum: I neared the The United States Holocaust Memorial in D.C

I stepped into the The Peter Eisenman Berlin Memorial: I gazed at the Martyrs’ Memorial in Bangladesh: I stood atop the Memorial to the Babi Yar Memorial in Kyiv: I stood afar from the Arlington Memorial Amphitheater: I touched the water of New York’s 9/11 Memorial:

I still suffer from blind eyes to the architecture of those said memorials: I reconvene with  the Japanese internment: I remember the sounds of lives not mine: I see the sounds of lives not mind: I drown in the sights and sounds that I have not witnessed:

My camera has never been a witness to murder and mayhem: Conflicts and errors of nations are heard: I have heard about the Hutu and Tutsi: I have read about the Bosnian War: One million conflicts in the Middle East: Almost ten thousand years of human turmoil: What remains is a mere evidence of a camera in panoramic mode: Centuries in a single frame across my decades are the constant: Planets’ eternity I always remember: Paul Celan’s Sand from the Urn comes to mind: I conjure what the fantasists do in my mind: It is what I do on my streets and beyond: Merlin resides where my dreams live: Our heart sees through our eyes: Our eyes see through through our heart: I want to make anything more beautiful: I may never achieve the overwhelming visual:

Illinois Holocaust Memorial: Architect Stanley Tigerman.

 

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