Taking pictures has been my personal way of looking at the world, and taking notes, for decades.

What matters to me, when taking photographs in the street, or while idling between meetings in an office building, is not at all that unique and unforgettable moment.

Instead, I want to frame stories, follow traces, and share a few visual obsessions. For these pages here below, my travelogues are zooming in on urban spaces, or more precisely, unintended urban sculptures, and purposefully cultivated urban gardens. Enjoy.

As cities compete with nation states on defining how millions of citizens live together, it is easy to overlook the more modest primary capacity of (big) urban dwellings: To organize space.

On the largest scale, this is what city governments and urban planners are all about, and all the public monuments leave little doubt on how important that governance is meant to be. But on street corners, behind fences, or in a bland hallway, the most stunning markers are set up, often unintentionally, to organize that space.

Here is my collection of such "Urban Sculptures" in Beijing, Guangzhou, Moscow and New York:

• Beijing and Guangzhou, China


• Moscow, Russia


• New York, US, part 01


• New York, US, part 02.

With more coming up.

Cities are made of stone, bricks, steel, or concrete. Yet plants grow in any one little crack. And more often than admitted by planners, city dwellers protect these plants, by watering and potting the shoots, and carefully opening spaces especially for the plants, vertically even, if necessary, or on top of the buildings, as if the stone and the fortified concrete require some softening, to become spaces for living things.

Which got me into paying special attention to the incredible adaptations of the concept of the "garden" fitted into the framework of the city.

2 sets of pictures have resulted, one on "urban gardens" in general, the other on gardens in Chinese cities in particular.