Bulbs – to bare or not to bare? In modern interiors, exposed light globes have been popping up everywhere to the extent that they’ve become the stylist’s cliché for urban cool. It’s a clean and minimalist look alright, but I have always had mixed feelings about it. Industrial loft-style living in a tiny apartment or random townhouse? Naked bulbs just hanging? Please no. But now that we’re busy making plans to replace the outdated electrical wiring at Lescure, I had to take a good look at our makeshift lighting solutions. Not a set dresser or hipster in sight and somehow we have ended up with bare bulbs everywhere. In a castle.

I decided to use our temporary lighting as a motive for some zen-like photography. Modest and calm in composition, the bulbs look vulnerable and add to the beauty of the castle’s decline. Against the water-stained walls and crumbling ceilings, they take on the qualities of wabi-sabi aesthetics: incompleteness and imperfection. The bayonet fittings and crooked wires seem to be sprouting from a mysterious surface, there to do nothing more than assume their place and radiate what is. From boring practicality came the unplanned beauty of humility and simplicity. It took a camera lens to make me see.