It occurs to me that the title of this post may suggest we will be looking at particularly dramatic graffiti in public bathrooms, but no, sorry to disappoint on that account.

I am sharing pictures of small tragedy and comedy masks that have been hanging on the red wall of the guest bathroom on the ground floor of my family home in Berlin for as long as I can remember. I’ve always enjoyed them but, after a long adulthood of taking them for granted, today I was taken with them anew, enjoying their expressions and how they looked in the light on the red wall; so I decided to take some beauty shots of them.

My parents acquired the masks in a souvenir shop in Delphi, Greece, before I was born. They have been with us since the 1960s. One of them particularly looks a little worse for wear. I suspect rough play via my brother or myself. My mother suspects a certain cleaning lady she once employed who “cleaned too aggressively and was always breaking things and then not telling me about it”.

I remember being enchanted by the two masks as a child long before I understood they represented Comedy and Tragedy in Ancient Greek theater. I mused on their expressions and relationship to another. They became characters in stories of my young imagination. No surprise perhaps I would become an actor and theater maker.

There is no one shot of them both together because on the bathroom wall they share there is a large mirror separating them. There are also many other curious pieces of art and framed images in this little cozy guest bathroom, but on this occasion I want to focus on just these two.