Doorways

 F's work place has 8 offices around the world.  Even before plague and pestilence changed the amount of time F spends at home, the 'sports and social committee' in the company was getting imaginative about finding way all the employees in all the offices could participate in some 'fun' stuff.

They aren't big offices.  The smallest has 2 people.  F's work place has 5, so the corporate culture is to make sure no one feels isolated or out on a precarious limb. 

One of the longer running 'events' is a photographic competition which rolls over 3 or 4 times a year (there is always one underway) and each time it is renewed a new theme is nominated.

The theme of the current iteration is 'doorways'.

F doesn't normally enter a photo.  She's a snapper not an artist, but we pass a lot of doorways on out walks, so I convinced her to think about it.

She has been thinking about it.

'Doors' and 'doorways' are quite different things.  Doors fit into doorways (if you are lucky, they fit) but they stop the doorway being what it was designed and built to be - a portal from one place to another, from here to there, from this to that, from in to out (or vice versa).  

Doorways are a transition.  Doors are an end; a terminus.

In this age, this place, these times, most doors are closed.  There are some very decorative closed doors, but they don't achieve what an excellently framed doorway should achieve: a glimpse of the 'other', a hint, a flint on which to spark curiosity, something that draws the eye and makes the viewer want to see more of what is beyond.

Beyond.

A doorway is the edge of beyond.

Gateways.   If I am standing in the street looking through a human sized gap at a garden contained within, am I peering through a doorway or a gateway?  When is a door a gate? In a fence?  In a wall? Between two outside spaces?  Does it make a difference if you know what sort of hardware is used to close the hole?

We did find a doorway that provides a glimpse of a tableau that might have been someone's life.  We call this (somewhat prosaically) "doorway on a life not fulfilled".  (A title is a requirement apparently.)

It won't win any competitions.  Winners are chose by popular vote.  The most popular is always pretty, not gritty.  Does that make gritty a worthless entry?  It probably makes it a pointless entry, particularly if we had any designs on winning, but it has value even if only to remind us that there are worse places to be in this world; even now.

So it could be a statement, or is that simply too teenage?

BTW - the broken window at the back gives more of the sort of 'glimpse' we were seeking