remembering rockport seaport
February. 12. 2012
"There either is or is not a way things are.
The color of the day. How it felt to be a child. The feeling of saltwater on your sunburned legs. Sometimes the water is yellow. Sometimes it's red. The color in memory depends on the day. I won't tell the story the way it happened. I'll tell it the way I remember it." - Mitch Glazer (Adaptive screenplay for Charles Dickens' Great Expectations)
rum boogie cafe
January. 28. 2012
what I miss most about the dirty south is the music (and the biscuits)…
I love you, my hope
November. 24. 2011
Purple sunset on a crisp evening walk with a friend today- unaltered I swear!
Friends often question my exuberance, asking me what makes me a happy person and I struggle to articulate that happiness is a spontaneous state of being. The list of reasons I rattle off when questioned begins with having breath and consciousness, but inevitably ends with the love I find everywhere.
I remember walking to my student job, tired and beat on an ordinary Louisiana afternoon beaming in the bliss of just being there, then. I remember tearing up in waking meditation simply feeling “So much joy! So much love!” That is the ecstasy of being- what is joy but synchronicity with existence and its magnificent flood? Even when it’s bad, it’s good- it’s all good. Happiness is a state of mind, I choose to exist in joy through and through the shit. And the love I have for and get from my family and friends, helps me shine on- they are my hope.
This Thanksgiving I am evermore grateful for you beautiful people who keep my life whole. Forget the miles between us, I feel the sweetness in you. I love you, my hope- Happy Thanksgiving!
look up, look out
November. 2. 2011
as the snow flashes by…
the highway series
October. 25. 2011
fueling my timeless dance with displacement, wheeling out of Boston-
“Never wish away distance. Never wish away time.”
-Bruce Weber
freedom from fear
September. 11. 2011
“All material in nature,
the mountains and the streams and the air and we,
are made of Light which has been spent,
and this crumpled mass called material casts a shadow,
and the shadow belongs to Light.”
– Louis Kahn
I came to the United States as a student on August 30th, 2001. 12 days after my arrival, the WTC was bombed.
Still jet-lagged, skipping Ms. Olin’s 9am class, I was asleep when Alli barged into my dorm room and exclaimed, “Ishi! They bombed the WTC!” But in my fitful fever, my mind couldn’t parse through the information well enough to command consciousness and I zoomed back into sleep. It was only later when I answered the phone to my new best friend’s quivering voice that I realized what had just happened.
Even as I stood trembling, incapacitated by shock waves of horror flowing through my being, living the crash in my head, I couldn’t entirely fathom it all. And somewhere in my trembling, I realized I knew this feeling all too well. It was the first attack on American soil, but the Indian soil in me had quivered before in the face of the same terror, many a time.
Before that morning, I did not know what WTC stood for and had never been to New York. Shy in my newness I wondered if I could honestly be a part of the grief? In which capacity does a legal alien console her 12 day old friends?
Although it wasn’t all 9/11 that did it, since that fateful day, I have grown up. The event gave me a premature preview into the American psyche and this society’s mechanisms of dealing with grief and disaster, very different from the fatalist nonchalance I was used to in India…With typically American efficiency, meetings were called, we were given phones to call home to re-assure our parents and cautioned against going out into town alone. Caught off-guard and cornered into switching points of view, my sense of self questioned itself and for the first time I contemplated my being as the Other.
I have lived and loved, won and lost and surrendered pieces of my heart to souls deep within American folds while nurturing them into mine; I have watched the dispersion of fear and the struggle to overcome it in an intoxicated, unpredictable dance which moves us all through the darkness, through the light. Resilience is a beautiful thing, grace under pressure, that is what defines a great civilization, or a human being.
“I have no fear at all at all, I have no fears at all.”
marfa window
September. 7. 2011
looking through concrete Judd into the wilderness…
stranded
September. 6. 2011
I have this love affair with trains that just won’t die. Found this stranded cargo train on the road to Marfa, TX (iphone shot hanging out the window)…ingredients for a swell weekend in West Jesus Nowhere-
1. one good friend+
2. the desert sky+
3. a tent to pitch (w/ hammocks)+
4. minimalist art+
5. falling stars+
6. an unusual bookstore+
7. and serendpitious reunions
= Ishi heaven!
Cyclical City
September. 1. 2011
Meandering through the streets of Tokyo, by yours truly. A very brief photo-essay for Architizer based on my Traveling Fellowship to Tokyo in October 2010…hope you enjoy the escapades!
full stop.
August. 8. 2011
August 8 marks the second atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and is a good time for reflection, no matter which side of the war you fell on.
Sometimes it is good to encounter the edges of one’s profession, because then you may begin to stretch it. At the peace memorial in Hiroshima, I watched this little girl walk round and round the monument. Architecture can only do so much, I realized. No pain will be alleviated by the helix better than the cube, no wounds healed by steel and concrete. All it can do, is give a community a sacred space in which to collectively mourn and remember, and hopefully find the love to see each other through, and to let bygones be bygones.
check it!
August. 4. 2011
Commission for Architizer- shots of the Perot Museum as published.
The deck park is going to make this whole thing come alive, hopefully people will get out there to hang, once the triple digit heat leaves the city alone! All in good time, I guess!
za-koenji
August. 3. 2011
It’s the kind of day that I if I lived in Tokyo I would swoop up Suginami and hit up the Za Koenji Theatre in Tokyo by my very beloved
Toyo Ito. You won’t find a single square here, and that’s exactly what I crave somedays!
morphosis
July. 31. 2011
Just got off Woodall Rogers Freeway, shooting the Perot Museum of Science and Nature for Architizer after an exhilarating adventure, treading the highway and feeling cars swooshhh past my tripod!
Something about the first shot reminds me of the quarries Edward Burtynsky’s often shoots…except the delineation of chiseled form is so much more controlled…more photographic adventures ahead, as this beautiful beast comes alive.
My photographs are up on architizer’s website, so enjoy some Morphosis if you will, and send me some lovings on www.facebook.com/studioish!
falling up
July. 7. 2011
and staring into the whirlwind atmosphere at 27,000 feet
she almost fell upwards, head on the ground (fast dissipating) and feet in the clouds
there was nowhere to go but up, and she had no fear of falling
and there is much to be said about that.
still
May. 28. 2011
“the password is books…speak easy,” he said.
reflection
May. 20. 2011
still can’t get over the show…what a gorgeous walk in the clouds
scattering
May. 20. 2011
the laws of physics at play….live from my “chair in the sky!”
dispersion
May. 20. 2011
i still can’t believe we can fly in the sky
fluid mechanics
May. 20. 2011
leaving storm clouds behind, flying west at dusk…like flying through a series of the wildest brushstrokes-
add the bonus of bonding with 26D and 26E, and you have one helluva trip-
thanks matt and seth for stellar in-flight shenanigans!
roadshine
May. 12. 2011
the rain came down last night to kiss the parched ground…its beauty so persuasive, it made the asphalt glow golden
ahem…that, and Oak Cliff really needs some road makeovers!
[Shot true color by the way: no sepia-ing in photoshop- the evening did it for me]
