The ‘Doortrait’ Artists of Instagram

By LAURA M. HOLSON - AUG. 3, 2016

Every morning Tamara Yurovsky takes her wire fox terrier, Oliver, for a walk in Vinegar Hill, an enclave of Greek
Revival homes built in the 1830s along the Brooklyn waterfront. Along the way he preens for photographs posted by
Ms. Yurovsky on the Instagram account @oliver_thewirefox.

“He totally owns it,” Ms. Yurovsky said, adding, “If Oliver feels like directing, then you have to go with the flow.”

Oliver is certainly a cute little guy, but the real stars of many of Ms. Yurovsky’s photographs are the neighborhood’s
doors, windows and facades.

“Doors say a lot about a place,” she said. “But they also conceal many possible realities.”

Such photographs belong to a genre all their own (“doortraits,” as they are called on Instagram), and they are
surging in popularity.

Martha Reyes, who lives in Florida, and Katie Smith, from London, teamed up recently to start @ihaveathingforwalls,
an account that brings together photos of mostly doors and windows from Instagram accounts around the world.

The two women have never met in person, but after seeing each other’s photographs, they decided to collaborate.
They communicate mostly using WhatsApp and split weekly oversight of the Instagram account, which has roughly
40,000 followers.

Present-day doortraits are rooted in painting’s past. Seventeenth-century Dutch painters portrayed doors and
windows as a bridge between worlds: home and street life, worldliness and spirituality. In the 1800s, the first
photographers harkened back to those themes, among them the British inventor William Henry Fox Talbot, whose
“The Open Door,” was a conscious mirroring of the Dutch masters.

“It evokes a kind of voyeurism, wondering what is going on behind a door or window,” said Erin Barnett, the director
of exhibitions and collections for the International Center of Photography in Downtown Manhattan.

In the mid-1970s, the photographer Roy Colmer captured more than 3,000 doors in Manhattan, and the pictures are
now part of the collection at the New York Public Library. Mr. Colmer’s inspiration, according to Elizabeth Cronin, the
library’s assistant curator of photography, was Aldous Huxley’s “Doors of Perception.”

Ms. Cronin said that Mr. Colmer was interested in street life, and photographing doors gave him a certain cover. “No
one was noticing these doors, and it gave him a sense of freedom,” she said.

Andrew Howell, a graphic designer who lives in suburban London, said attending church services as a young boy
sparked his interest in urban portals; for one, he wondered what mystery lurked behind the church tower’s closed
door.

Now he can be found, camera in hand, wandering East London for his @doors_of_england Instagram account, which
has more than 5,800 followers.

“You could be in 18th-century London,” he said of the neighborhood he is chronicling. “I want to document it while it
is still there.”

Abdullah Alriyami, a writer from Oman who lives in Rabat, Morocco, began taking doortraits in Morocco and Oman a
few years ago when he got his first smartphone.

He is concerned that globalization will obliterate local culture and with it, the doors and windows that make each
place unique. In Morocco, for instance, many of the wooden doors he photographs are hand-carved with elaborate
decorations. Others are brightly painted or forged in metal and hammered into shape.

Mr. Alriyami was interviewed by email, with translations by his daughter, Maryam Al Tubi, a student at the
University of South Carolina. “Doors and windows in architecture are just like the eyes in people,” Mr. Alriyami
wrote. “It is through your eyes that I know about you and we communicate better. A door is not just a tool for
security and protection, it is a cultural symbol of a human being.”

A worry shared by many of those who take part in this Instagram genre is that the people on the other side of the
doors may not appreciate the intrusion of a stranger with a camera. “I do get worried in certain neighborhoods that
people might get upset,” said Ms. Yurovsky, who photographs her terrier in Brooklyn. Luckily, her dog is a polite New
Yorker.

“For the record,” she said, “Oliver has never gone to the bathroom on anyone’s door.”
Adapted from https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/04/fashion/door-photographs-windows-instagram.html