While cycling around my town, there was one door that I regularly passed by. Every time I looked at it, I started to like the door more than before. I think many people might never really notice it, as it is not terribly exposed, but to me it always has something magical.
To me, this door looks like it comes from from some kind of fantasy or steam punk world. Why did someone decide to put such a big and magnificent window over this door? I don’t know. But I like it.
Over some time, I noticed that there are actually quite a bit of doors with circular windows above them that use stained glass. And not only this, there are many other interesting and beautiful doors around. Doors made with excellent craftmanship, big and magnificent portals and lavish entrances. I wondered for whom they were built and what they were supposed to portray. I started to look at others too, simple, broken or ugly doors. I noticed how different doors come from different eras and thus are influenced by different architectual styles. I started to look at them with different eyes and began to notice what values and paradigms were important at the time they have been built. And as my town has such a diversity of architectual eras, this began to be quite an interesting pastime for my head while I was cycling around.
As I am also an avid analogue photographer, the idea came to my mind that these doors could make for a great little photo project. They are an easy target to shoot (as they are quite patient with me finding the right focus and apeture) and I like cycling around my town and taking pictures anyways. So the idea grew in my head: Create a photo series that captures the breadth of doors of my town and through them show a bit about the people that they were built for and the times they came from.
I set myself this goal:
1 Photo Trips
For several weekends, I took my bike and camera out for a ride through my town. I like cycling most, when I have no destination, and I can take what ever street that seems interesting and stop at any time. So I used these photo projects to get to know some neighborhoods that I have not been much before. Whenever a door caught my eye, I stopped an did the following things:
- Measure the aperture with an app on my phone (as the light sensor of my camera is broken)
- Take the analogue picture
- Get the location of the door with my phone
- Take a digital picture of the door with my phone
- Send the digital picture and the location to myself in a messenger
Through this little protocol, I capture metadata like location, date and time if I want to use them in the future. Sometimes, also some analogue pictures are not developed well, so this allows me to find the door again in the future to take another picture. With this little protocol, I did a total of five photo trips that each lasted 1-3 hours.
2 Development
I gave the finished films to my local drug store (I still need to find a good photo studio for this) and let them be developed. This usually takes 1-2 weeks. As I shot the doors across four different films that were full at different times, this step took a longer time to finish. At his moment of writing, I am done with taking all pictures but need to finish the current film in the camera and give it to development. Therefore I set the project to pending ⏳ .
I have already developed a couple pictures and here are some impressions:
