They're the invisible men who know the secrets of New York's rich and famous, but rarely are their names known or their stories told.
Welcome to the world of a Manhattan doorman.
Photographer Alina Gozin'a spent months exploring this curious cultural phenomenon and is now bringing her findings to Australia for the At Your Door exhibition.
"It's an incredible, bizarre and wonderful culture of the doormen, which I don't think exists anywhere else in the world the way it does in New York, and Manhattan predominantly," she told News Breakfast.
Gozin'a is a Russian-born migrant who moved to Australia before finding work in New York photographing some of their most famous and powerful.
It was while hunting for an apartment that she became obsessed with the idea of doormen and decided to dig a little deeper.
"I was really fascinated; why does somebody need to open a door for you? Why do you need a guy in your building?"
When New Yorkers overwhelmingly told her it was to collect packages, she told them:
"Well in Australia you just go to the post office and you collect it, and they thought I was from a different planet. That's how I started unravelling the story."
The doormen story has captured the imagination of millions, and not just those who live abroad.
The New York Times says they are "sentries" and perhaps the "most underrated powerful people" in the city.
In his book Doormen, author Peter Bearman describes them as "gatekeepers of secrets".
After initially scoffing at the people who lived in buildings with doormen, Gozin'a eventually found herself in one of her own.
"I've got a lot of stories from them, I'm not sure they can go on record," she said.
"They know what you eat, they know what you do for work, they know who comes to visit you. They do guard your secrets very, very close to heart.
"They know everything about you, we know nothing about them."
This was something Gozin'a set out to change, and in her exhibition ended up documenting doormen who had migrated from eastern Europe.
They were former painters, architects and engineers — some of whom left Russia when the Soviet Union collapsed — and they had dreams of their own.
It's a story that's close to Gozin'a's own heart.
"You travel abroad in search of a better life and you do find it, but you've got to give something up," she said.
"They'd say, 'being a doormen is better than washing dishes, but it's not as good as being an architect'.
"The sacrifice sometimes isn't visible."
