Monday, January 5, 2009

Mysteries : The Roadside Shoe

For the record, I have been photographing roadkill and other roadside attractions during various travels for only about the last 30 years or thereabouts. I've been pleased to learn recently thanks to the wondrous powers of the internet that... after having thought for a long time that I was a rare and perhaps unique breed, in fact I am not alone and there are many others out there with keen eyes for the miraculous or at least mysterious array of wonders that await anyone willing to look a little more closely, and willing to question what they see, be it so lowly as a lonesome single shoe laying by the side of the road...
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If you are curious to see what a few other folks have to say about about the lone shoe syndrome at loose in the world, have a look at this UK website , or this story about a whole multitude of shoes dumped by the roadside in the recent Miami Shoe Incident ; or another site asking similar questions : One shoe in road , or this one : Road Shoe Blog site
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Perhaps the best and most creative however is the One Shoe Diary site which contains a large number of lost shoes, and which has received serious press coverage on CNN and elsewhere. Mr Hamilton has taken roadside photography to a new degree of serious artistic expression... Bravo!
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I came across this lone shoe along a road on the CDG Airport just north of Paris, France. If I see any more lost "soles", will be sure to post them. Also, for anyone interested in this sort of thing, the book "Another Roadside Attraction" by Tom Robbins is of course required reading.
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1 comment:

jzeperni said...

Hey, Owen. Diana forwarded the link to your blog, and I've been enjoying your pix and ponderings. Today's thought is, "So *that's* what fois gras looks like!" I'd always pictured it as a grey mush, like Gerber's chopped liver for babies. It is perhaps one of the few foods that is more appealing in real life than in imagination-- unlike oysters and soft-shell crabs, which are truly best left to the imagination.

Janet Spearing Zepernick
jzeperni@pittstate.edu