Friday 6 February 2009

My old shoes - an introduction

They've had their day; I should have discarded them long ago; placed them carefully on the pavement alongside my local street bin like the other people round here do. But I couldn't; I was still too attached to them. If anyone was to tell me that they'd given their shoes a decent burial I'd believe them; that exactly how I feel about these shoes - my old shoes.

They look old but in fact I only bought them six months ago in Ben Calçat for thirty five euros; a price I could afford even though I knew they wouldn't last, because they're made for a leisurely stroll and not for climbing over rocks or trekking. I particularly like the mixture of canvas and leather that hints at the sophistication of an earlier age, the soles that are recycled car tyres and the medley of styles. The leather is so soft that it immediately takes on the shape of your foot; there's no chaffing of the heel, no painful blisters, no suffering.

More than any other item, a pair of shoes comes to reflect the distinctive personality of its owner. The creases in the leather and the lateral distensions caused by a biased step or the inevitable differences between right and left foot; and then, more revealing still, there's the condition of the leather itself which is a measure of their owner's self respect. A cobbler might guess with confidence the character of any wearer.

So now that I can no longer use them, why do I hesitate to throw them away? It is because in these worn out shoes, splintered and corroded, I see an isssue that I must resolve and which these husks have suddenly brought to light. First I had to document them; so I simply placed them on the floor and photographed them without any elaborate ceremonies. But when I got the prints back from the local photo shop I saw that I'd unintentionally created a fiction - a potential misunderstanding. Because of the vaguely Moorish design of my floor tiles it might be thought that these shoes had been respectfully set aside while thier owner went to pray and like many a tourist I had taken advantage of his absence to record an item of ethnic colour. Obviously this is not the case and in what follows such an innocent interpretation is quite out of place.

2 comments:

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Anonymous said...

you need to make this a book! quite emotional... thank you :)