Three Walls — Douglas, Isle of Man

Three walls meet at a corner, and not one of them reaches the ground inside the picture. An olive gable on the left, cut off by its own roofline. Behind it a grey wall, streaked where water has run down it for years, capped by a slate chimney with a tuft of moss on top. A lilac wall to the right. Below, the parapet of the yard I was standing in closes the frame.

The colour is not the buildings’. It is shifted afterwards — a decision, not a record. What the camera found was three surfaces at three angles to the same light; what I changed was the temperature at which you read them.

This is the only frame in the series taken looking up. The others are made standing square in front of a wall, and the wall answers by staying flat. Here the planes tip, the sky comes in as a fourth field, and the picture holds together not because the surfaces are parallel but because none of them is granted any depth.

Photographed in Douglas on the Isle of Man. Part of Fremde Fassaden, an ongoing series of colour-shifted façades made in Berlin, with detours to Duisburg, Visby and Douglas. See the other works made beyond Berlin.