It seems like all I’ve shot recently is shoes.  Old, dirty shoes.  Fair enough.  I have a big bin of them.  I found one or two lying in a heap of abandoned household items, and was just taken with the beautiful way that years of baking in the desert sun had degraded them.  The splitting of the glue, the cracking of the leather, and the fraying of the threads had turned them into beautiful aesthetic objects (or at least objects that I knew would photograph beautifully).  Their silhouettes had become twisted, and their smooth surfaces transformed into vast plains of gritty texture.

Most of the other things people had left behind didn’t fare as well.  They were preserved or decomposed in ways that were, at least to me, visually uninteresting.  Styrofoam and plastic just look like dirty, discarded versions of their pristine forms.  Clothes were more or less completely decomposed into masses of torn thread and dirt.  Electronics and machines just looked broken.  But the shoes!  The shoes had, like the juice of grapes in the hands of a master vinter, become wine, instead of vinegar or fertilizer.  They had aged beautifully, and often looked more poetic 10 years after being heaped into a pile than they ever did adorning someone’s feet.

Beautiful decay.  The tension between what something was created to look like, and what nature is incessantly transforming it into.  And the irony that something could become beautiful precisely because someone had so unceremoniously heaped it outside their condemned apartment building.

So I spent a whole day wandering through abandoned properties and snatching up all the shoes I could find.  I picked up some other odds and ends – a weathered paintbrush (above), a completely skinless baseball, a headless Barbie torso – but came home with literally a closet full of nasty old shoes.  And I’ve been working on shooting them, in my spare time, since early ‘09 (not that I’ve had much to devote).

I’m not a full-time photographer any more, but I also shot professionally long enough to have been completely spoiled when it comes to the technical side of making images.  I have a hard time going out and just making pictures, and just letting them be “okay.”  If I’m going to press the shutter down on a personal project, I want the result to be as good as I’m capable of making (within reason, I suppose).  So I started shooting this project on 8×10.  I want these prints, if and when they’re ever exhibited, to own some wallspace, because part of their charm is in the tiny details you can get lost in.  I like big prints, but I hate when I get close to them and they fall apart.  It’s a little disappointing.

But 8×10 is a bitch to work with.  I was tray-developing my own film, scanning and dusting it, and though I didn’t mind the process, per se, it just came to be that I didn’t have the time to work with it.  Again, this is spare-time personal work, and with an infant crawling around the house, that time has been severely squeezed.  So last month I finally sprang for a H3DII-39.  I had tested the Hassy earlier last year, and it was the first digital camera system I’ve ever used where I was just blown away by the quality.  Pixel peepers will say it’s as good at 4×5.  I’ll say it’s plain good enough for anything I plan on doing, and if it’s not, I can easily stitch.  For the stuff I’ve been doing, and the stuff I would do if I had more time, it’s a pretty ideal system.

All of these images were shot on the new Hassy over the last couple days.  The upside is that I have a direct digital capture, and once I press the shutter I can run upstairs and start working on the post-production.  I also have a more practical way to use several captures, with different lighting or focus distances, to extend dynamic range or depth of field.  For shot #3 in this post (the twisted boot with the zipper) I shot 9 frames, and used 5 in the final composite.  Doing that with 8×10 would mean that I could only do one shot per day, since that’s about all the film holders I have.  Losing camera movements sucks, but if it turns out to be a huge deal, I’ll just man up and buy the HTS 1.5 tilt-shift adapter.  It’s a nice camera system.

It’s been nice to shoot inanimate objects, on my own schedule, and I enjoy the challenge of composing, lighting, and printing something to give it presence on paper.  It’s hard.  I have a new respect for product photographers.  But I also miss having people in front of the lens.  It’s lonely shooting the things people leave behind.

Hopefully I have more time to finish this project and start some new ones in 2010, and hopefully some of these images finally find their way onto a gallery wall somewhere.  The web is a shitty place to view a photo.