Hotel mood is a running or bleeding of an emotion, as ink runs when water touches it ----Wayne Koestenbaum, in Hotel Theory

"Simplicity is the keynote of true elegance" --- Coco Chanel

"The painter creates, the photographer discloses" ---Susan Sontag

"Lisbon itself is almost wholly charming---a model city of nearly a million people and an incalculable number of dogs.....Most visitors to Portugal have come here to see something old, but the Portugese are full of zeal to show you something new....." ---Mary McCarthey Letter from Portugal in Neal Slavin's : PORTUGAL (Lustrum Press, 1971).

I came across this abandoned Fàbrica Manequim on my way up several flights of stairs in this old building in Lisbon’s Chiado. I was looking for the shop of a camera repairman ---who I found and who masterly fixed my Mamiya. I was into the space, and I was equally fascinated and disturbed. Intense replicas of humans and human parts covered the floors and walls. It was as if the entire factory of workers left for coffee over decades ago and never came back. Molds, paint cans, and half-finished mannequins everywhere. Even invoices left in the typewriter. I returned to photograph twice, both with the living human form--- returning a third time to be astonished it had been condemned and gutted without warning. This studio was lost--- but the real story only began...

Midnight welcomes a new day, yet few witness the intrigue when the stillness of these hours is interrupted.

Now in its second decade, this project captures the essence of Ted's visit to 100 cities through a single image. Nearly completed, the 2015 CONTACT Photography Festival show, "33/100", will feature a the first public glimpse curated by Hilda Yasseri. Color printing by Carole Fonde of New York City.

" The Bogota used to share its walls with a bedraggled, old hooker-bar, which I loved. It was low-lit, with stained velvet banquettes and stained, jolly ladies-of-the-night. In bustiers and fishnets, les girls sometimes stood outside, under a blinking neon sign, right next to the steps of the hotel. Until last year. Now the "piano bar" has become a kitchen design centre, another deathly tendril from the rest of Europe that will one day turn Berlin into everywhere else. Soon, I suppose, the Bogota will change with the prevailing weather into The Four Seasons." ---Rupert Everett