Urbanus Indy is an on going photo documentary project. The images exhibit some of the growth and changes in urban Indianapolis, IN during the last ten years of the 20th century through the 21st century. 

Abandoned Footwear Found on the Streets of Indianapolis

Many times while looking up to find my next architectural subject to photograph I’ve noticed on the ground the occasional article of clothing. Random items, like shirts, shoes, coats and sweaters. I began to realize that out of all of these items, I saw shoes the most.

I asked other people if they could recall seeing abandon shoes on the streets. None could recall, but after our discussions of abandon shoes some people did start to notice them on the streets as well.

This lead to these questions for me. Like, who are the people that would remove their shoes on a public street to leave them and why? If one shoe is left, where is the other one? Which is stranger, a pair of abandoned shoes, a single shoe or two pairs of shoes? Is this a known practice on the street to just leave unwanted shoes for someone else? What do you think?

These questions and the shoes that I noticed lead to this exhibit as a part of my continuing photographic study of urban growth, changes and culture here in the city of Indianapolis. If you haven’t already, now you might start to notice some of the abandon footwear found on the streets of Indianapolis too.

Art Deco architectural details found in the design and construction of buildings in Indianapolis.

The concept for this series of images was informed by combining ideas from the DaDa (Dadaism) period in art history with the exquisite corpse parlor game. DaDa’s contribution to this project is based on the idea that “ready made” items are art.

In the game, exquisite corpse players in turn add random drawings or words to a shared composition to create a unique drawing or statement. The fun in the game comes from each player not knowing what was added by the previous player until the end of the game.

For this project four types of pins and other pieces were selected as the “ready made” items. Then, randomly selected cut out words were placed within the composition in the order of selection. Finally, a lensless photographic process was used to produce the images.