Las Puertas del Puerto The Doors of the Port

A door is the first thing a house shows the street, and usually the last thing anyone replaces. So it holds what the rest of the façade has already lost: the carpenter's craft, the nail someone drove in for good measure, the chain from the day the place had to close and never opened again.

The project comes out of walking Puerto Vallarta with the camera in hand. No people, no golden hour, no tricks: head-on, at eye level, in whatever light is there. The door alone, and what the door says.

This is not nostalgia. Vallarta rebuilds itself every season, and in that hurry the wooden doors go, along with the hand-forged iron and a color nobody mixed again. Many of them no longer exist: replaced with aluminum, painted white, or simply gone. The photograph is what is left of them.

The series is open-ended. Whenever a door holds the eye, it ends up here.