I think I first started really looking at walls after seeing the Egyptian frescoes in the British Museum. Seeing the effects of weathering & wear over the years. So different from a nice clean postcard
My execution is not up to my imagination when taking photographs, but sometimes I like to try. They make beautiful abstracts. Lichen is good. And dry stone walls
But derelict or semi-demolished urban buildings hold a beauty too.
A wall can be merely a wall, but in some of Cartier-Bressons photographs the walls are painfully human, & live & talk about themselves. There is that vulgar wall behind the man in the brass bed; that great lonesome wall of broken paint & plaster along which some child is wandering; there is a huge sun-bright wall of a prison or an apartment house with a boy who is like a shadow at its base … There is the clash of sun & shadow, like modern music, in a Cartier-Bresson picture
Langston Hughes introduction to catalogue for Mexican exhibition 1935
