My faithful readers know by now that I photograph shoes with the same, or almost the same, passion as I photograph birds. And last week I was in luck at a funky Gala.

The nice thing about the loose dress code at PDX events is the range of shoes one encounters. Some of them were quite cool, although I saw none last week that approached, even remotely, the works of art at the Brooklyn Museum linked to below.

If you have time take a look at the short clip from BAM – I was stuck between drooling and wondering how on earth one manages to walk in those things without busting an ankle. Maybe they should sell these kinds of shoes with a health insurance addendum, just in case….

Exception to the rule- pumps…..

It will quickly become clear why the exhibit was called Killer Heels….

Shoes as art is one thing; art about shoes quite another. Painters and philosophers obviously share a preoccupation with the subject, as the images and texts below illustrate. Van Gogh painted them

and Heidegger, Meyer Shapiro and Derrida analyzed them:

The Origin of the Work of Art(1935):

From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, the trembling before the impending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. From out of this protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting-within-itself.

(Accumulated tenacity does not extend to my memory. Excerpts of Heidegger, Shapiro and Derrida were found in a Harper’s article while searching for the 2009 van Gogh shoe exhibit at the Wallraff-Richartz museum in Cologne. That I remembered.)

https://harpers.org/blog/2009/10/philosophers-rumble-over-van-goghs-shoes/

Here is what I wore last week:

Here are some more examples of van Gogh’s take:

I want to reserve my love – on Valentine’s Day and every day – for humans, not material objects. So let me just say that I love finding myself in such varied company of those who party, paint, philosophize and in general walk this earth!

HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY