Not A Fetish, A Crusade
09.22.2011 
Since October of 2007, Richard has been photographing orphaned or abandoned shoes on the streets of San Francisco, then Los Angeles, and now, Paris.
The collection began on a chilly night when he and our friend Willis Barnstone were walking along Valencia Street toward the 16th and Mission BART station, and Willis noted how many shoes were abandoned on the street in just a few short blocks.
Richard took it as a mission to chronicle the orphans with his little point-and-shoot, and has continued with the iPhone camera, and now, the Nikon.
In the course of posting them on Flickr, he's noted that a lot of people LIKE pictures of shoes, and there's even a special forum for lost baby shoes. O-kay.
But aside from being an urban art project that comments on abandonment and isolation (enough justification, as far as Paris Play is concerned), is there a deeper meaning?
Perhaps.
Today, over at the Trocadero, the grand public park that looks out across the Seine at the Eiffel Tower, the organization Handicap International invited the public, as it has done since 1995 in more than forty European cities (and now aross the globe), to bring a pair of shoes to donate, and as a protest. Every shoe in the pyramid represents a limb or life lost to cluster bombs and landmines.
During the day, various NGOs provided background information about cluster bombs and landmines, and advocated for their abolition. They are banned by international treaties (Ottowa 1997, Oslo 2008), but as Handicap International notes, "landmines and cluster munitions were used in Libya this spring. Furthermore, Thailand acknowledged having made use of cluster munitions during confrontations with Cambodia last February."
The United States has yet to sign either treaty, according to the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate International Campaign to Ban Land Mines.
Richard's art project will continue, but it's now impossible for us to see an abandoned shoe without also thinking of the limbs and lives lost to land mines and cluster bombs.
Reader Comments (22)
Another great piece. such lonely symbols - did they run right out of them - like a cartoon?
You can almost visualize the person who filled them, still standing there. Might be a good prompt to imagine how they got there.
I wonder what a forensic person could tell us about that person. From the tread. Are there shoe-lace knot experts (a la handwriting) the wear of the tread. (heavy? lop-sided?) Does the sweat of feet leave a reek of diet?
Are there shoe pairs hanging over wires in Paris? (in LA ... it can mean - Drugs sold here ! )
The pile of shoes cannot help but have resonance with the mountain of shoes from The Holocaust. Even a small hill of them freaks me out.
s
Hi, Steve,
We love your comment. It has so many aspects to it which mirror aspects of your mind: humor, imagination, analysis, curiosity, parallel examples in other places, a sense of gravitas about the horror of which humans are capable.
I didn't know that about shoes hung over wires in L.A. I wonder what happens then to people who live near hung shoes who are NOT dealing drugs. Do they get unwanted knocks on the door?
Thank you so much,
Kaaren & Richard