The Story Behind the Photograph
Dublin's Georgian squares play a wonderful trick: the houses are nearly identical — same brick, same fanlights, same proportions handed down by eighteenth-century pattern books — and so the residents poured every ounce of individuality into the one thing they could: the front door. Scarlet, canary, cobalt, pine green, aubergine. Brass knockers polished to fire.
I spent two soft gray days working the squares — Merrion, Fitzwilliam and their neighbors — photographing doors one at a time, square-on, in the flat Irish light that behaves like a giant studio softbox. The final piece gathers the best of them into a single composition, a grid of doors that reads like a paint chart with a hundred years of stories behind it. Choosing the final doors took longer than photographing them; several dozen contenders did not make the wall.
About Dublin's Georgian Doors
The doors belong to Dublin's Georgian core, built in the decades around 1800 when the city's great squares went up in disciplined brick rows. Strict building leases standardized the architecture, and the legend — embellished but cheerfully repeated — is that the doors were painted boldly so neighbors could tell their houses apart. The tradition outlived its origins and became the city's signature; the famous Doors of Dublin poster of the 1970s carried it around the world. Bodies such as the Irish Georgian Society work to conserve these streetscapes, fanlights, knockers and all.
For photographers, the doors are a masterclass in constraint: identical frames, infinite variations. It is the closest architecture comes to portraiture.
Photographer's Notes
Each door photographed with a short telephoto from across the footpath, camera level to keep the verticals true, in overcast light for even color. The assembled print was offered both as a single piece and as one of the gallery's triples, and it outsold nearly everything Irish except the music. It shares a wall — and an argument — with the Mexican Blue Door, and travels well beside the Rectory Cottage for those assembling a British Isles set.