Looking Through Afghanistan's Closed Doors: A Personal Essay by Finbarr O'Reilly of Reuters – NYTimes.com

These doorways symbolize the closed nature of Afghan society, as well as the fact that United States Marines are tolerated — but not entirely welcomed — by the local population. I suppose, in some way, they also reflect my own frustration about not having access to the people of Afghanistan while on military embeds. Photographing doors allowed me to imagine the hidden world behind them, like the line from Baudelaire’s poem, “Windows“: “Looking from outside into an open window one never sees as much as when one looks through a closed window.”