The Sentient Wall
Covered in graffiti, fire-charred, ivy-grown, or half tumbled down, a wall is the diary of its environment—in the words of photographer Minor White, “a blackboard on which happenstance does the writing.”
Walls are the faces of buildings: they share the upright stance of their inhabitants and return the human gaze through mirrors, windows, and pictures. In daily life, walls are too commonplace to earn much attention. But in photographs—reality theatricalized—walls take on the meaningfulness of props on a stage.
Even photographs made with no pretensions to art make symbols of their subjects. The splintered wall in a war correspondent’s snapshot plays a different role than the ancient, pockmarked wall absorbing sunlight in a souvenir-maker’s view of Rome. The camera teaches even the plainest of objects to speak in many dialects.
