I like this strange and perhaps enigmatic image of a shoe with its heel-strap hooked over a spike on the wrought iron fence at the University of Melbourne. Like a discarded remnant of an S & M ritual, the shoe, clean and unworn, bore no traces of the owner long gone. But there it was, opened as well as closed, with a hint of aesthetic pleasure. The soft bare foot slides in, the painted toe-nails just slightly exposed through the small front aperture. Surrealism with just a touch of 19 Century romanticism under the hand of a skilled Black Smith. Was the shoe lost, or did she purposely discard one because she could not longer bear to wear the shoes she had worn with him the last time they met. Her shoe a metaphor of impaled emotions. The spikes pointing upwards and constructed in such a way that nothing that became lodged would ever manage to be free. 'Your feet make marks on my face, create scratches across my eyes'!
Image of shoe is poignant with the absence of all that you mention, like a broken promise.
ReplyDeleteContrary to what anyone thinks, I didn't put the shoe there - it's still there today in exactly the same position & I wondered, am I the only person who noticed it, other than the person who placed it there so seductively? And yes, not avoiding your comment about a broken promise - that happens all the time and for all kinds of reasons!
ReplyDeleteBut if it were posed it would surely have been a very different photograph. Is really cool you can make an image from a found image like that *admires*
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