Door portraits or doortraits have become quite a thing since a few years. Travellers used to take pictures of landscape and local portraits, but now along with local cuisine, doors have become an object of fascination.
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The Instagram trend may seem new, but the history of capturing doorways has a long history. Seventeenth century Dutch artists had a passion for painting doors and windows—they wanted to simultaneously represent both home and street life. More recently, 1970s photographer Roy Colmer captured more than 3,000 doors in Manhattan, which are now featured as a collection in the New York Public Library.
But, why doors?
Doors seem to have a voyeuristic quality to them. They hold secrets, and these secrets excite the people. They may also be symbols of duality of society. Not the cliched hypocrisy, but the duality or dual personas that we all carry.
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While they say eyes are windows to the soul, doors too carry a cultural symbol of a pathway to something deeper than what meets the eye.
Another feature of doors is that they convey a lot of cultural context. For instance, a yellow buildings with blue doors and a bougainvillea vine is instinctively associated with French colonies, and typically found in Puducherry in India. The torans over modern doors immediately tell you that the house belongs to a Gujarati person. Or the white houses with blue doors in Santorini. Or the heavily nailed wooden doors in Rajasthan.
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There are some with particular fascination for vintage and traditional doors. They mark their travel diaries with these photographers.
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Doors also have a certain aesthetic quality that lends a perfect symmetry to a picture composition. What may pass as routine to a normal eye may be enhanced as a prop for the photographer.
Doors may be mundane to some, but they have become objects of art.
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