Photographers Love Doors

Photographers love to take shots of old doors.

Google it. There are go-zillions of them. I remember one summer years ago my sister and I drove all over the countryside for weeks photographing old doors. It was her college photo class assignment. I’m not sure what we learned from that experience other than there are a lot of beat up old doors in the world.

What is it about doors that photographers find so fascinating?

Is it the symbolism? The ancient Roman god Janus is the god of doorways, of beginnings, endings, and transitions. He has two faces – one looking to the past and one to the future. A door can be an entrance or an exit. It can lock you out or lock you in. So many possibilities of meaning in one simple structure. I’m sure that’s part of it.

Maybe another part is that they’re pretty easy to shoot. They don’t move. You can shoot ’em from the sidewalk. The lighting isn’t too tricky. They come with built in framing. They can be quite elaborate and they acquire plenty of character after many years of use.

I hate taking photos of doors. I consider myself a contrarian photographer so I bothers me when I take photos of the same things that everybody else does.

Still even I can’t resist the siren call of the doorway. I don’t go out looking for them or make it a point to photograph every beat up old door I pass, but sometimes when I get home from a day of shooting, there they are hiding in between the other images. “Did I take those? What was I thinking? Not bad though. Maybe I’ll develop just one. OK maybe that one too. Heck, let’s do them all.”

Here’s one of those door photos that I took while on my way to shoot something else.

I’m going to rationalize it by saying that I wasn’t really interested in the door so much as the building it’s hinged to. You see there was this really old cobblestone building sitting in the woods. Being made of stone and mortar the walls were intact, but the wooden roof was completely gone. Sunlight filled the interior. The floor must have been wood too, since it had disappeared and was replaced by a riot of weeds and vines.

Any shot I took of the inside of the building just looked like a bunch of weeds in the sun. That didn’t convey the concept of time and the juxtaposition of the roof versus the stone walls. Stepping back to photograph the outside of the building didn’t work either. It was just an old building and the missing roof wasn’t evident unless I climbed a tree and shot down on it.

What worked for me was to isolate the door. The fact that it is relatively firmly attached and hanging there shows that the building walls are still solid. The rays of the sun flowing out the opening show the missing roof and how much the interior is alive with light. There are so many weeds and vines growing in the building that they’re spilling out of the empty window casings.

I photographed all the essential elements of that building in one shot without showing very much of the structure at all. You’re free to imagine the size and shape and surroundings any way you like. I think that leaving room for the viewer’s imagination is important. It allows a photograph to become more than just a duplication of an object. It becomes a unique journey for each viewer.

MDW