Wednesday, September 5, 2018

Doorways

[description: portrait of a nude man standing at the front door, viewed from inside, and from outside]

For an exhibitionist, there's something exciting about a doorway. It marks the boundary between two worlds - the private world, and the public world - beyond which certain activities may begin to pick up a taboo energy. But it's also a gateway connecting those two worlds, and so there's the implicit suggestion of conjunction and passage. Standing in a doorway is the closest you can get to the outside world, without actually leaving the relative safety (or at least comfort) of the inside world. It's like standing on the brink of a precipice, and savoring the thrill of the height, before (or even without) taking the plunge.

And for the voyeur, there's the excitement of possibility - of what you might get a glimpse of through an open doorway, peeking into that other world. It's no surprise that this theme recurs again and again in my photography.