Hello and welcome back to all black and white enthusiasts. Today's theme is texzres. I don’t really walk around noticing “things” first. It’s always texture. Before I register what something is, I notice how it sits in the world. The way old paint curls off a door like it’s tired. The roughness of concrete that’s been stepped on a thousand times. Even something simple like a wall in bad light suddenly becomes interesting if the surface is doing something unusual.
I think that’s just how my brain works now as a photographer. I don’t really look for subjects in a traditional way. I look for surfaces that have something going on.
Light changes everything, obviously, but mostly it changes texture. Morning light makes everything feel softer, almost forgiving. It brings out details you normally ignore. Later in the day it gets harsher and more direct, and suddenly the same surface feels completely different. More honest, maybe even a bit uncomfortable.
I catch myself stopping way too often just to look at random corners of things. Rust on metal. Dirty glass. A patch of worn stone steps. Stuff most people would walk past without thinking twice.
But to me it never feels like “nothing.” It always feels like something that has been happening for a long time, just quietly.
I like that textures carry time in them. You can kind of read it if you slow down enough. Smooth things feel new, almost like they don’t have much history yet. Rough, broken, uneven surfaces feel like they’ve lived a bit. Like they’ve been through weather, hands, use, neglect.
When I shoot, I’m usually not trying to explain a place. I’m trying to isolate that feeling. To pull a fragment of surface out of its context until it stops being a wall or a floor or a piece of metal, and just becomes something abstract.
Sometimes I think that’s the closest I get to actually seeing. Not the object itself, but everything happening on top of it.
