The stories they could tell us

I had a vivid imagination as a child. Pretend play was more important and more fulfilling to me than more active play like outdoor games or sports. Not only would I create elaborate worlds where I was the main protagonist, but I would also place myself into existing fictional stories, such as Star Trek, living out my dream of being the captain of a starship. My love of stories fueled my desire to read, and today, even though I like to mix my reading between fiction and non-fiction, my stack of books is heavily weighed towards fiction, with Steinbeck dominating the stack. 

Perhaps it's that imagination - that love of stories - that compels me to photograph old things. I want to know what stories might be behind those items. Like the old gas pump in Randsburg, California. Who got their gas pumped from that device? Perhaps some famous Hollywood movie star stopped there to gas up their Chrysler or maybe a Dusenberg as they were coming back from a making a movie in the Alabama Hills. Or the old, rusting combines in the middle of the Carrizo Plain. What are the stories of the men that operated those? 

I am wondering what are the stories these places could tell us?

One of my favorite photographic subjects are the California Missions. While I have not visited all of them, the ones I have visited are in various states of disrepair or restoration. Take the Mission San Juan Capistrano. Much of it has been restored, but the old church still is a shell, destroyed in 1812 by a large earthquake. Or Mission Santa Inez, restored, but heavily commercialized by being so close to the tourist town of Solvang. Or my favorite, Mission La Purisima, near Lompoc, which is the only mission to have been fully restored. 

While there are many photographic subjects to be found in the California Missions, it is the various doors and doorways that seem to capture my attention, perhaps because I wonder who may have walked through that door. Perhaps, in some of the earlier Missions, I may be walking through a doorway that Fr. Junipero Serra may have walked through himself. Or maybe another doorway would have been a place where the native Californians would have walked through to go to Mass. Or maybe a doorway to the barracks would have been a place where a onetime famous soldier would have passed through. 

These doorways compel us to pass through them. Sometimes the doors are open, or unlocked. Sometimes they are locked. Doorways beckon us to see what may be on the other side or on the inside, or if inside, what is on the outside. They beg us to move forward, or to keep out or in. 

But for me, these doorways whisper to me to stop. To take a moment and contemplate "who passed through this door before me?"

Door, Mission San Antonio de Padua, May 1998, c2019 John Prothero