Figure of speech 01

Neighborhoods rarely speak in words alone. They may prefer creatures, masks, improvised heraldry, and painted faces too strange to qualify as decoration and too deliberate to count as accident.

An elephant appears where no elephant should be, emerging from a garbage point’s concrete shell like an impromptu projection from some low-budget cosmic zoo. A yellow fish kind-of-thing opens its mouth across a worn wall, equal parts joke, warning, and doodled apparition. Elsewhere, a larger mural gathers a whole crowd of agitated forms into something like a public dream, or a communal lapse in composure.

Together they form a rather visual rhetoric: exaggeration, distortion, personification, and other figures of speech applied directly to concrete. These three photographs are small excerpts from that unruly language: the city talking in images when words no longer seem quite sufficient.