untitled (3) 2008
Ten days ago while I was in D.U.M.B.O. I casually snapped this detail of an old brick wall. I was intrigued by the weeds growing out of cracks in the worn masonry and rusted iron of the dignified mid-nineteenth-century former warehouse of which it was a part. The massive structure had long ago lost its purpose and it now hovered above a neat lawn on a Brooklyn shore being made safe for investors and young families.
Only as I looked at the picture just now while I was putting it up, remembering what the huge pattern of brick and shuttered openings looked like on that drizzly day, did it occur to me to relate it (the scene, not my photograph) to Piranesi's "Vedute di Roma", which described the weedier walls of a much more ancient city 250 years ago.