doors of manhattan

“Look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else,” the playwright Tom Stoppard once wrote.

I've always thought the same thing about doors. They're mysterious; they hold promise of adventures, and secrets. I can't help but wonder what's happening behind them; or what world will emerge if I opened them. I guess you could say I have a thing for doors. Especially red ones. I first noticed my obsession when I visited the Greek island of Santorini years ago. As I gazed at the hilltop village of Oia and its sea of white houses, I noticed a bright red door on a house at the top of the hill across from our terrace. I couldn't get enough of that door.

In my 25-plus years as a journalist, I've never taken photographs professionally — I teach journalism to graduate students at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism and at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism — but I've been taking photos of doors ever since that red door caught my eye. A sampling of the doors of Manhattan.