The Gates Still Open
There is a smell that memory keeps long after the image has faded. Chalk dust and damp wool. Pencil shavings and old wood. The cold that clung to stone walls on winter mornings when the classroom hadn’t yet warmed — the particular stillness of a room that held you when you wanted to be somewhere else. I have carried that smell for decades without knowing it. It lives in the back of the nose, waiting.
I found it again here. In an abandoned chapel in France, standing inside ironwork gates that someone had left open — as though whoever last passed through simply forgot to close them, or chose not to. The floor was covered in debris. Plaster had fallen in patches from the walls. The prie-dieu still knelt at their places, patient and absurd in the silence. Two saints stood in their niches, neither looking at each other. And at the far end of the nave, a single candle still burned at the altar.
That candle stopped me.
Everything else in this building had been given back to dust. The ceremony was over. The congregation was long gone. And yet the flame was there — small, orange, steady — as though someone had only just stepped away and would return in a moment. It is the most unsettling kind of absence: the kind that looks like presence.
The musty air did its work the moment I crossed the threshold. That same compound of damp stone and old wood and something else — incense perhaps, worked so deeply into the walls over so many years that it had become the walls. It brought back those childhood rooms I thought I had left behind. The classroom on a grey afternoon. The hours that passed like slow water. The way certain places hold you in a feeling without asking your permission.
Abandoned buildings do this. They take the universal and make it personal. Everyone who stands inside a space like this brings their own version of the past with them. The threshold that stops you before you enter is not just physical — it is the moment when the present touches something older, something you thought you had outgrown.
I photographed from the entrance, framed by the gates. I wanted the ironwork in — the crosses, the ornament, the yellow paint still holding its colour against everything around it that was dissolving. That contrast is the image. Order and collapse. What was made to last, and what was simply left.
This work belongs within the wider body of work in the Sanctum of Shadows collection — spaces that were once consecrated to something, and have since been returned to silence. Each one holds a different quality of absence. This one holds melancholy. The soft, heavy kind. The kind that settles in the chest and does not apologise for itself.
Someone knelt on those prie-dieu every week for years. Wore them smooth. Bowed their head toward that altar in the way their parents had, in the way their children would. The prayers they said in this room were not abstract — they were the prayers of cold mornings and private grief and the particular kind of hope that only survives inside four walls. And then, one day, the last of them left. Pulled the gate behind them. Or didn’t. And the room kept everything they had placed inside it, faithfully, in the dark.
That is what I was trying to hold when I made this image. Not the ruin. Not the drama of decay. The faithfulness of it. The way a place carries what was left inside it long after the leaving is done — the way it waits, without knowing it is waiting, for someone to come back and recognise what is still there.
This piece does not announce itself. Hung in a room, it settles into the wall quietly and begins its work slowly — the candle pulling the eye through the gates, the saints at their stations, the debris on the floor that somehow does not diminish the stillness but deepens it. It is not simply looked at. It is returned to. And each time, something different surfaces.
The Gates Still Open
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