Introverted doors

This week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, hosted by Sylvia, is all about doors and doorways.

Doors. We open and close them dozens of times each day. We use them to organize our space. To get access. To open to the world. To protect from the world.

But there are also doors that won’t open. They are not in use anymore or they’ve never been in use. They seem to be there to hide rather than reveal something.

The most interesting doors are not the ones that open and shut incessantly, but the ones that make you wonder why are they there for. The ones that, rather than opening to something beyond themselves, seem to be turning in towards themselves.

Like this red door matching the red flowers just beneath it and the two windows upstairs, covered by wooden boards. Everything is neatly arranged and clean as if the people from the household had just left the scene. But there’s no way in or out. The flower pots on the ground block the access and suggest the door hasn’t been used in a while.

Or this little door from Lisbon’s Alfama district, surrounded by azulejos, the painted ceramic tiles so typical of the city, and the picture of St. Anthony, the patron saint of Lisbon.

Or this wooden door of what used to be a small chapel house in the woods. The ceiling is gone and the vegetation has taken over, growing wildly on top of the walls. There is no inside anymore to which the door would give access. It’s just the forest outside connected to the forest inside the walls.

Or this mural painting in Brussels, of a husband leaving the house while his wife is welcoming her lover upstairs. Among all the physical doors to the left and to the right, this painted door is by far the most visible. It’s a door whose role is not to allow access to the house but to open it to the outside world. It’s a statement made with the language of doors, windows, and passageways.

There are visible doors that remain closed forever. And there are invisible doors that become visible only when they close. I wrote about this in a previous post.