Two Sides Away From My Front Door

The image I posted today is called “Two Sides Away From My Front Door.”  I started conceptualizing this Image while I was working on “The War Against Inside/Outside: A Documentary,” which also involved a number of photographs of doors.  As I thought about doors, I considered some of the ways they are important in our current place and time.  As I mentioned in a previous blog post, entering and exiting buildings now involves changes in personal protective equipment and hygene. Further to that, a lot of us are spending a lot more of our time in our own house, for better or for worse.   Therefore, our own front doors are gaining new significance.  
To that end, I began considering the way in which my door is both on the inside and the outside of my house.  When I consider my door, I do so from the place where I am at the time.  When I am inside my house, the door is on the inside and when I am outside my house the door is on outside.  As I’ve mentioned before I am interested in binaries…that is, things that are supposedly one way or the other. But maybe many binaries are like doors and what they are has more to do with our own perspective.  
To explore this concept visually, I photographed my front door from the inside and the outside, lined the images up in Photoshop, and layered them with the “subtraction” mode.  The result was an instant mix of the two photographs, which I did not plan.  In this way I have again abdicated myself of some of the control over the image.  When I introduce chance like this, it is not to sublimate the unconscious, as the Surrealists would have. I use chance to deliberately distance myself from responsibility for the image, in a playful and possibly ironic manner that contrasts with the bulk of my image making practices, which involve a lot of control over the process.  Finally, I included the inside/outside coin.  Coins have a built-in binary (heads or tails) but this one also relates the image of the door to issues regarding our current time and place.