ENTRY DESCRIPTION
Pareidolia is the phenomenon of recognizing patterns, shapes, and familiar objects in a vague and sometimes random stimulus.
RationalWiki

The natural pareidolia photographed here are actually stains, mosses or limestone present on walls or on the ground. Their origins are natural : humidity, moulds, erosion, degradation, etc.
Everyone can see any particular shape.

AUTHOR
My name is Marc Ulbrich, I’m French and I live in north-eastern France in the Grand Est region in Lorraine. I use RetMarkus as an alias to publish my pictures on social networking sites and on my Flickr and 500PX accounts.
https://500px.com/retmarkus/galleries
https://www.flickr.com/photos/retmarkus/

I’m a self-taught photographer.
A few decades ago, I started photography using my father’s 1930’s Voigtländer. It’s my father who bought me my first reflex silver film camera. Many more cameras later, thanks to my mother’s inheritance, I bought myself my first dslr camera together with professional camera lenses.
Apart from landscapes and trees, I have a predilection for street scenes, industrial sites, light and mirror effects together with marks or traces (posters, stains or marks on walls, pareidolia…). I like confrontations between old and new.
I try to have a documentary approach which is aesthetic but which also allows us to become sensitive to the realities of the world around us. I often think of Walker Evans’s photographs while taking pictures myself.
In this day and age, I put forward my multiple ancestries. Contrary to what my family name may suggest, my grandfather was Italian. My origins are linked to the local histories of the Lorraine industrial and mining area made of migrations, intermingling of populations, conquests and re-conquests (my grandmother’s parents, on my father’s side, came from Saxony-Anhalt in Germany after the German Empire annexed Alsace and most of Lorraine in 1871). I am the son of people who were naturalized. I consider these as fine origins and they are the roots of my tolerances.
Exoticism and humanity are right on our doorsteps, we should simply open our eyes to see them.

“Poetry is not a genre, it’s a state of mind.” Andréï Tarkovski

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