all photos by ka_nai (“The Wall”)
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. It’s a common adage that often rings true, especially depending on your background. Walls, for example, don’t immediately come to mind as a thing of beauty. And thanks to a certain president, they don’t exactly have a great connotation right now. But none of that stopped one Instagram user from spreading his love for walls across the Internet.
So much going on, on this wall!
Roughly 8 years ago a Japanese designer who goes by the name “The Wall” (ザ壁) began posting pictures of walls with the hashtag #ザ壁部 (The Wall Club). And with a community of users larger than most countries, the designer quickly found a following: like-minded photographers who equally took pleasure in walls. There are plain walls, dirty walls, old walls, walls with piping, walls with windows and walls with no windows. In fact, flipping through all these walls, it’s not difficult to begin to see the aesthetic qualities of walls.
The hashtag now has over 85,000 photographs of walls associated with it. And meetups are occasionally organized in which fellow wall-enthusiasts will get together in Tokyo to photograph a wall. I think I’m ready to join one.
this filthy wall, with a pipe covering a poster of David Lynch, may be my favorite
Brick walls are nice. Brick walls with electricity meters are even nicer.
a wall covered with a stacked wall
Wow I can’t get enough of this really old wall
white wall, white piping and white windows. Stunning!
