CounterPunch+ Exclusives

CounterPunch+ Exclusives

Architecture of Cities: Mapping Beauty XXIII

New York City’s WTC and more.

It takes two to Tango: Every photograph I make is a dance: A recipe with a dash of phantasmagoria  and Applied Science: Two words, two worlds hinged together by vocabulary- -creatively: The two conceptual mindsets nest alongside- – Holding a secret whisper inside my camera: The conscious and unconscious life. The visual experiences likens the cotton of sheep and the steel of industry intermingling: Billions witness this stage enactment as if admiring the flight of a boomerang. Then again we dance.

Phantasmagoria is where I live when my mind and body are en route- -en route to visit an unexpected or entertain an expected capture. Sherlock Holmes had his seven-per-cent-solution, Coleridge exposed his  “Kubla Khan’’  unrestrained dreamscapes: I merely imagine: camera in hand I march towards somewhere almost anywhere creating uninhibited fantasy’s- -uninhibited truths. The visual ideas seen in my footsteps and architecture’s  footprints arrive and vanish as quickly as the imagination allows.

Park Complex and East River Development: East River Plaza.

Photography is an adventure where fantasy is fused with an imaginary not yet experienced: Applied Sciences are the home of the practical and manufactured mechanisms that are utilized to build- -and fuse the chemical and material: The promise of invention poses and sits before the eyes and invites the imagination- -the fictional truth.

Cities are introduced to my camera: Cities that I have not known- -They may vanish and maybe rebirthed: Time is not on my side: Two-hundred plus countries live on the planet: Innumerable cities arrive and pass as in passed: I must hurry- -we must hurry: Dreams are accumulating: Dreams are here and then:

I step into my dreams the same way I step into movies: I was side by side with Jean Gabin in Pépé Le Moko: The Casbah was ours: I was side by side with Kirk Douglas in The Detective: New York was ours: I was side by side with Orson Welles in The Lady from Shanghai: Multiple cities were ours.

I daily remind my camera that we are alive in worlds not ours: I daily Step into Liquid as the surfing documentary begs: I want to be alive in worlds not quite yours- -not quite mine: Alive in worlds larger than we allow ourselves to venture into: I invite phantasmagoria into my mind and I step into liquid and there again the shutter is released- -and so I dream: I need to live:

Architect David Adjaye: Washington DC: Smithsonian National Museum Of African American History.

There are no checkmates in my photography: The science of dreams the dreams that become science are hidden places like spare cupboards where I can stash away moments for tomorrow- -imaginary moments to apply the science and imagination of photography to capture something and almost anything:

I stood in Agra: I stood in Rio: I stood inside the oceans’ waves, the desert’s sands and the apex of mountains- -I have come to believe that Lewis Carroll’s “Alice is real”- -Ursula K. Le Guin’ science fiction is truthful and Tolkiens middle earth is near by: How else do I explain dreaming while constructing a photograph in mind and in truthful fiction?

Charles Sheeler and Edward Weston for example never merely snapped a photograph: They constructed images: They manufactured tones and shapes to accommodate their ideas: Their photography of architecture was never a shutter release away: They recorded moments: They manufactured  exposures: They considered how and why to utilize chemicals: Phantasmagoria and Applied Sciences seen in architecture’s history- -Photography’s history: Addressed in their time and in real time: I can only imagine the  photographs I dream about: Then I continue in my very own playpen.

Architect: Moshe Safdie: Detail of Washington D.C: United States Institute of Peace Headquarters.

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

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