Beyond Berlin — Duisburg, Visby and Douglas

Four frames in this series were not made in Berlin. They are here because they settled something I could not test at home: whether the way of looking survives the move.

Duisburg, November 2025. A gable end at the end of a row, photographed from the pavement so that the corner reads as two flat planes rather than a volume — ochre above, a band of red below, and across both the shadow of a roof that is not in the picture. Ruhr building stock, unremarkable, due for renovation or demolition depending on whom you ask. The light was low and came from the side, which is the only reason the corner reads at all.

Visby, on Gotland. A gable falls across a rendered wall, and the roof it belongs to is somewhere behind me. The shadow lies flat and lets every crack in the render show through. A medieval town, a wall repaired more often than it was built — and none of that history is legible in the frame. What is legible is a surface and an edge.

A second wall in the same town, photographed in June, does the opposite. Where the first work is filled edge to edge with a shadow, this one is mostly empty: a white rendered wall between two gables, and across it the flat shadow of the pantiled roof opposite, its zigzag repeating the tile course above. Here the colour decision sits on the two edges — an ochre gable, a turquoise sky — and leaves the middle alone.

A fourth frame comes from Douglas on the Isle of Man: a back yard, three rendered walls meeting above a parapet, seen from below. It is the only picture in the series taken looking up.

The three places have nothing in common: a post-industrial city on the Rhine, a Hanseatic town on a Baltic island, a Victorian seaside town in the Irish Sea. That is the reason for including them. If the pictures only worked in Berlin, the subject would be Berlin. It is not. The subject is what happens when a wall is treated as a picture plane — the colour someone chose years ago, the light crossing it today, and the decision I make afterwards about the temperature at which you read both.

Part of Fremde Fassaden. All four are available as signed, numbered archival pigment prints on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308.