Since 1997, David Batchelor has been photographing blank, white, rectangular panels that he finds in the streets of the cities he visits, from London to Sāo Paulo. While he started looking at how abstraction is embedded in the urban fabric, the series has grown into a far more personal project, a psychological map of each city he visits.
The monochromes of the street are occasional, often inadvertent and always temporary. For Batchelor they are moments of blankness in an otherwise saturated visual landscape; rectangular planes of nothingness that can also appear as voids at the centre of the field of vision. As such they are like errors: a space where there shouldn’t be a space, an absence where there should be a presence.
