Nobody's Perfect

I've been known to be a pack-rat all my adult life, I save everything..... well, not literally, I do get rid of some stuff but I've been tempted to save everything. Needless to say, I've come under some small amount of criticism for this practice, but not lately.

Of all the stuff I'm tempted to save, and this is in addition to all the cool souvenirs I've collected over a lifetime making pictures, the most notable are old articles of clothing. There's a couple of shirts I've had since 1995, for example, that still look good and that are so comfortable I'm loathe to discard them. My favorite things to save, however, are old shoes.

I have big feet (I'm a big guy) and finding comfortable shoes is a big problem. I could drink three black cherry sodas contemplating the liquidation of a pair of shoes... that's how long it takes... but I've found that the perfect way to save things is simply to photograph them and save the picture, then discard the item. This is especially helpful when you're talking about old shoes. Nobody (but me) really wants to save old shoes.

The other day I was talking to my friend Dave Johnson about Polaroid. I happened to mention that I liked to shoot with Polachrome and Polapan instant films, when they were available, and that made me nostalgic and I started pulling old instant slides out of the file and scanning them as a preservation method. One of my favorite Polapan images is the one above, a picture of a particular pair of old Puma basketball shoes I was deeply fond of.

Just thought I'd share it with you.

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Above: Nikon F3, 10.5cm/f2.5 Nikkor lens, Polapan film