Colour-Shifted Façades in Kreuzberg

Kreuzberg is where most of this series was made, for a reason that has nothing to do with the district’s reputation: I live here. The block in Apartment Block, Kreuzberg — I stands opposite my window. I have watched the sun move across it for years, which is another way of saying I never had to go looking for the light. I only had to wait for it.

That proximity shows. Most of these frames were made within walking distance of one another: a shutter pulled down to the sill, a roof edge where three colours step over each other, an ochre wall meeting a pink one with a gable between them, four ventilation stacks standing against the concrete of Peter Poelzig’s Klinikum Am Urban. None of it is remarkable architecture. Post-war infill, rendered firewalls, a hospital annexe — the kind of surface you pass without registering.

Which is the point. A façade only becomes a picture once you stop reading it as a building: once the render is a plane, the shadow is an edge, and the colour is a decision rather than a fact. In Kreuzberg the walls do half that work already. They are flat, close, and painted in colours nobody would choose twice.

One frame is from Neukölln, a few streets south across the canal. Two firewalls meet at a seam and agree on nothing. It belongs here more than anywhere else.

The colour in all of these is shifted afterwards — not to improve the buildings, but to change the temperature at which you read them. What the camera found was the geometry and the light crossing it. Part of Fremde Fassaden; each work is available as a signed, numbered archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308.