Wall & Metamorphoses

« A wall is something you build and forget about, take for granted. In our order of things, we give it a role to play and then forget about it. Actually, it is very alive; it is falling apart, it is unsteady, impermanent.

The Manhattan Wall Series, taken in 1990, was my farewell to New York. It took over five months. The walls were like the skin of a person; they looked permanent but could be very transitory. After a few days of wind or rain, glued posters and signs were either gone or something else. Returning to New York after a few years, I had found the walls had changed in character, become more gentrified, lacking in expressiveness. Also, the photographs of the walls seemed to change with the years. I imagine that they just might come into their own (like the laundry women of Picasso’s Blue Period) more alive than ever, when the very walls they sprang from no longer existed. Life keeps flowing on, transforming, rejuvenating or decaying. Such is both art and life, always changing in surprising and mysterious ways. » LS