Cartagena des Indias is a beautiful Colonial town on the North Coast of Colombia. Recently, I was commissioned to travel there by Hay Festival to make a short film about the activities that took place there. 

For those of you who might not be familiar with Hay, it is an organisation based in Hay-on-Wye, a beautiful little town nestled just on the border between England and Wales. The town itself has approximately 30 bookshops serving only 1900 inhabitants and the Festival brings 300 000 people a year from all over the world to indulge in literacy, arts, comedy and discussion on a whole range of topics.

Hay also collaborates with Festivals all around the world and we at Gingenious have been very fortunately commissioned to document them over the next year. So far we have visited Dhaka, Bangladesh and Kerala, India   and have been astonished at the levels of involvement and vibrancy of these festivals. 

I’ve been very fortunate to travel quite a bit professionally having recently completed work in Africa, South East Asia, South America and right across Europe, and the thing that strikes me most about everywhere I’ve been, because I think it says volumes about a place is the doors you see in the towns. 

At this point, I’m afraid you’ll have to forgive me because I know for a fact that I won’t be able to articulate what I want to say here but I suppose essentially I believe that doors have more personality than any other form of architecture. My favourites are battered old wooden doors that look like they’ve been open and closed, repainted and repaired for years, but really all doors have something to say. Look at dirty, white UPVC doors, or those horrible brown plastic doors with the fake stained glass, they all say something about the people living inside, or about the place they are situated. 

What I loved about Cartagena was that out of these massive, grand doors, normal blokes in flip flops were coming out to get their morning paper and I just wondered if people in Cartagena ever think about how beautiful their surroundings are, or even notice them anymore !

Anyway, above are some of the pictures that I took while I was there of some of these quite amazing doors. I’m planning to take pictures of doors everywhere I go from now on, as I really enjoyed taking my 5D out early in the morning and just wandering. Plus I never get to take photographs !

I hope you like them and do please share ! The video for Cartagena will be coming out very soon and I’ll post it up here when it does !

Cheers !

Ben 

http://www.gingenious.com

Source: gingenious.com