The Open Doors [Canon 5D]
July 21, 2009 Auerbach, Germany
(click in the image to see a larger version)
It's been awhile since I've posted an image for Time Machine Tuesday, so I thought I would remedy that situation with today's post. TMT is when I delve into the photo archives to find an image taken on the same day, or around the same day (give or take a week or so) from at least one year in the past. One of the fun benefits of these occasional jaunts down photo memory lane is that I often re-discover images that I had forgotten about, or ones that I had always meant to work on but just never got around to. Today's image falls into the latter category.
It was taken on a family visit to Germany two years ago. My wife's father lives in a beautiful old art nouveau-styled house dating from 1904. We had the entire downstairs apartment to ourselves on this trip and these doors immediately fascinated me, especially with the morning light streaming through the windows of the two rooms they opened into.
I have a weak spot for doors as photographic subject matter. Windows, too. They have the potential to be very powerful visual metaphors and symbols, and I definitely have a soft spot for those. I think the images that interest and move me the most, both my own work and the work of other photographers, are those that engage me on a deeper level. Whether it is a particularly evocotive portrayal of a person or a place, a photograph that suggests the hint of a story that invites me in and creates a path for my imagination to follow, or an image that can serve as a metaphor for other ideas, emotions and concepts, these are the photographs that resonate with me. These are the images that I remember and think about even after I am no longer viewing them.
This photo of the doors reaches that level for me. Beyond the simplicity of the scene and the lovely quality of the light, there are the other potential meanings that can be found here. Two open doors, each leading to a different place: a scene rich with the possibility for interpretation. Some of those interpretations may be shared among many different people, but others will be specific to the indvidual, depending on their own experiences and what is happening in their life at this moment. That's the beauty of art: We each find our own interpretation and meaning in the artwork we see. The artist may be the one who creates the artwork, but the viewer completes it.
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