At some point during my recent travels in Europe I came to the gradual realization that more than anything else, I was photographing walls. Though I was at first mildly baffled by this sudden fascination, I eventually came to understand the reasons that I find walls so intriguing as photographic subjects. I am attracted to walls for their two-dimensionality, a quality that severely constrains a photographer's compositional freedom. I find that this constraint affects my process of picture-making in a way that I enjoy; by removing the perspective-related challenges of composition, it allows me to focus on every subtle detail of visual information as I construct each frame. At the other end of the process, there is a similar effect: photographing a flat subject such as a wall often results in an image with many fewer contextual clues than a photograph with many levels of depth. For this reason, it is easier to focus more abstractly on the visual content of the image than on its correspondence to reality. But my attraction to walls goes beyond the effect they can have on my process of photography. As human artifacts, they hold immense power, real and symbolic: as imprisoning barriers, as protective boundaries, as historic monuments, and as the background to everyday life.