A few years ago, when I bought my first digital camera, I started a series of photographs that I called Urban Legends. I walked around catching photographs of layers of paint, undecipherable graffiti and random marks on walls made with spray paint or splatters or whatever.

I took this photograph the other morning on Bryant as I was walking around after lunch. These are paint test patches, I’m sure they’re everywhere – you know, when people can’t decide what color to paint the house, so they paint a square of color on the house to see if they can live with it. The other reason it might be there is to cover a piece of graffiti. To cover graffiti or gang markings, any color will do.

I took a number of photographs of this wall with varying degrees of zoom. This is the one that I liked the best. The painted rectangle on the wall and the molded rectangles on the garage door. The white garage door frame running down the middle dividing the two differentiates between the sculptural and the painterly, in a house paint/sculpture kind of way.

When I travel around, different places have different aspects that I use to create series. It was Paris that really gave me the beginnings of the Look Up series. It was Prague that gave me brickwork and cobblestones. And it was San Francisco that gave me Urban Legends. (You can see some of these on my travel photography web site.)

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