Bitumen Flour Merchant, Lodz Courtyard

Found this on the inner face of a tenement wall in Łódź that had been half-demolished and left — the demolition actually did the work, peeling back a century of render to expose three or four layers of trade signage stacked on top of each other like geological strata. The flour merchant's lettering sits uppermost, brushed in bituminous black over a ghost of something older in red oxide, both of them bleeding into the raw brick beneath. I shot it mid-afternoon in flat winter light so the texture of the enamel crackle would read without shadows flattening it.