Someone at the Door
For everyone who rang the bell.
Except for that NHK guy.
Doorbells used to be simple things. Push the button; spring behind the plastic compresses; two wires touch — ding-dong!
My Tokyo apartment has a doorbell lifted from sci-fi manga of the 90s. White plastic. Clacky buttons. Tacky blue LED. Surprisingly large screen for something that has ice-cube-sized pixels. Gadgets like this at home are ubiquitous in Japan, so I mostly ignored it. “Oh, I can see who’s ringing on the ground floor, neat” — I thought and forgot about it.
A few weeks ago, that garish blue LED refused to stop blinking. Nobody was ringing the bell. Being midnight, half-asleep, I accidentally fat-fingered on the wrong button and discovered that my doorbell records and stores low-framerate videos of everyone who has ever pushed the button. The corner of the display had familiar to any digital photographer text: ‘1/53.’
During all those times, my doorbell has captured dozens of “portraits” of people. Mailmen, friends, stubborn television salesmen — all doing the same thing — ringing my bell.
Being the relentless pixel hoarder that I am, my natural response was — “I want those!”
Locating an SD card or any ports on the device was a moot point. As if Apple designed the damn thing. Not knowing how long the doorbell would store the data, I got impatient and snapped images off the screen with my phone. They came out a bit skewed, but that matched the visual aesthetic of the atrocious screen.
Publishing photos of people who didn’t even know that they’re being recorded felt wrong (heck, I didn’t realize that before a few weeks ago!) — even if harmless. After cleansing my brain with 62% cask strength whisky, I had a lightbulb moment to collect all into — oh surprise! — a book.
The plain sequence of doorbell portraits didn’t really work, so I decided to include full-bleed photos of the doors captured during my long walks in Japan. As a tiny hint of sub-text, each door matches personality from the same spread.
