Photography project connected to PhD research between 2021–25, originally hosted on Instagram @portalspast. The photo series comprised of over 200 images, all taken in situ on a perpendicular axis typically 3–4 metres in front of each door.

According to ethnologist Pascal Dibie, “on a typical day, each one of us passes through doorways four or five hundred times”. Whether or not there is a universal truth in that claim, doors are undoubtably part of our daily lives and significant both for their function and cultural symbolism. Doors mark a point of transition, not just between architectural spaces, but also in time as a punctuation of the passing phases of our lives – whether entering an office door for the start of a working day or emerging through a church portal after a baptism, wedding, or funeral.

The selection below capture doors from across Norway, spontaneously in passing, from whatever caught the eye. Notably few of the doors I chose to photograph are from buildings designed during the past half century. If there is anything to be drawn from this casual study, it appears that the importance of the portal and decorated doorway in contemporary architecture has become increasingly less. ‘Interesting’ entrances and approaches to buildings have given way to modern standardisation – it appears the art of ‘making an entrance’ appears to be an endangered architectural craft. Yet, as this selection aims to illustrate, the doorway remains a site for individual creativity, with as many possible ways to design and emphasise the entrance to a building as there are reasons to enter one.

All images copyright the author. For more, see PhD thesis “Portal Propagations”, chapter 1: “Lost contexts: The purpose of portals”.