There is a quiet, almost conspiratorial pleasure in noticing the things walls are trying to tell us. Over the last few years, I have spent a fair amount of time listening to them. The resulting series, Wall Decorations, gathers images made between 2023 and 2026 in the Rheinpark Duisburg, in Brussels, in Oberhausen (Rhineland), and in my hometown area around Gladbeck in the Ruhr region.

At first glance, these photographs might look like a simple catalogue of graffiti, flaking paint and stubborn little plants clinging to concrete. Look a little longer, though, and they start behaving like characters. Some walls shout in bold slogans and political statements; others are more introverted, whispering through hairline cracks, faded posters or a single hopeful blade of grass. All of them have something to say—they just do it very quietly.

From graffiti to quiet commentary

Many of the images in Wall Decorations revolve around graffiti and street writing: slogans scrawled in haste, elaborate pieces, and fragments of text that feel like someone left half a sentence behind for us to complete. Sometimes the references are unmistakably political—there are acronyms, protests, and conspiratorial name‑dropping that most locals will recognise instantly. At other times, the meaning is more ambiguous, drifting somewhere between social commentary and private joke.

What interests me is not whether the messages are “good graffiti” or “bad graffiti”, nor whether I agree with them. Instead, I’m drawn to the way these marks turn walls into conversation partners. Once someone has written on a wall, that wall stops being neutral. It becomes an active participant in public life, repeating the same message day after day to anyone who passes, long after the author has moved on.

The beauty of decay

Another strand of the series focuses on surfaces where time has been doing its slow, patient work. Plaster bubbles and peels away from brickwork, paint curls like old wallpaper in an abandoned theatre, and moisture leaves behind intricate stains that almost resemble maps or ink drawings. In several images, these textures form shapes that invite interpretation: islands drifting on a white sea of plaster, ghostly faces, or silhouettes that may or may not actually be there.

These scenes are not traditionally “beautiful” in the sense of postcard prettiness. They are beautiful because they reveal how every wall is a record of events: layers of paint from different decades, repairs that almost match but not quite, structural scars that hint at former windows or doors. Decay is simply another form of writing—one in which time, weather and neglect take over the job that spray cans and markers started.

Nature’s small rebellions

Running through the series is a recurring theme of plants quietly reclaiming their share of the vertical world. Thin strands of grass emerge stubbornly from cracks in concrete; creepers trace delicate lines across otherwise blank facades; small clusters of weeds form tiny gardens along the base of a wall that no one ever consciously planted.

These botanical interruptions are easy to miss, but once you notice them, they transform the mood of the images. The walls are no longer just backdrops for human activity—they become contested spaces where nature insists on a foothold. There is something gently humorous about the determination of a single tuft of grass to turn a spotless wall into a shared project. At the same time, there is a quiet sense of resilience: no matter how often we repaint or resurface, something green will eventually show up and refuse to leave.

Silent conversations

If you have followed my work for a while, you will recognise that Wall Decorations sits comfortably within my ongoing exploration of “Silent Conversations”, a theme that has appeared repeatedly on my blog in various photographic contexts. Whether I am spending time with big cats, bears, birds or industrial landscapes, I am essentially doing the same thing: trying to photograph the moment when something non‑verbal seems to address us.

In this case, the conversation partners happen to be walls. They do not move, they do not have eyes, and yet they produce an endless stream of remarks—some accidental, some intentional, some so strange that it is hard to tell the difference. When I frame these scenes in black and white, I am not trying to make them more dramatic; I am simply stripping away the distraction of colour so that the conversation becomes clearer. Contrast, lines and shapes take over the job of speaking.

A shared visual language

Despite the different locations—Duisburg’s riverside paths, Brussels streets, residential corners of Oberhausen, and familiar spots in Gladbeck—the images share a common visual language. The series is united by a preference for strong graphic forms: rectangles of windows, bold diagonals of shadows, sharp edges of roofs and signboards, and, of course, the handwritten gestures of graffiti. Black and white emphasises this graphic quality, turning disparate scenes into parts of the same ongoing story.

Across all the photographs, human presence is oddly indirect. People are almost entirely absent, yet their traces are everywhere: in political slogans, in advertising promises, in the design of buildings, and in the half‑hearted attempts to clean up what someone else has written. The result is a sort of urban palimpsest—a layered text where each generation adds new comments but rarely bothers to erase the old ones properly.

A slightly amused point of view

While Wall Decorations touches on serious themes—political tension, social fragmentation, loneliness—it does so with a deliberately light touch. There is humour in the collisions between advertisement slogans and their surroundings, in the earnestness of certain messages and the obvious irony of others, and in the way walls unwittingly become critics of the very culture that built them.

My aim is not to lecture but to invite a double take: that small moment when you walk past a wall, stop, take a step back and realise that the scene is far stranger, funnier or more revealing than it first appeared. If the photographs in this series encourage that kind of pause—if they prompt you to notice the silent conversations taking place on the nearest wall—then they have done their job.