What I love about this photograph is that the two mirror-image houses in view have been so lovingly and meticulously differentiated by their owners. With the simple use of color, two separate families are able to ascribe their tastes and values onto their properties.

While the house on the left has a light beige coat of paint and dark brown for the posts, the house on the right has a light shade of canary yellow but with dark red for the posts. The intricate cast-iron lacework, so characteristic of these Victorian-era buildings in Melbourne, is off-white for the both buildings, reinforcing the similarity between the two houses. The lace also serves to counter the strong vertical shapes found throughout the photograph in the house, the electricity pole, and the metal fencing at the foreground.

There’s an eeriness to the photograph – it seems almost like a game of Spot the Difference, with the For Lease sign and haphazard street signs on the electricity pole. Yet the symmetry is broken by the length of the yellow metal fence extending beyond the middle, and the electricity pole anchored off-center to the left.