The Gloves Are Off

For many years now I've been noticing the personal items that get dropped onto pavements and roads, and which – if not found or picked up by someone – can spend a lengthy afterlife getting kicked around, trodden on, and slowly degraded into roadside rubbish. What these items are tends to change over time, along with fashions. For example, once upon a time easily the most frequently encountered escapees used to be black plastic combs, but these are no longer carried by men precariously in a trouser back pocket, and have become a rarity. Similarly, biros in varying degrees of distress and destruction used to be a much more common sight than they are now. The sheer variety of such kerbside casualties seems to have increased in recent times, although people have become such terrible litterbugs that it's hard to tell whether an object has been "lost" or simply tossed carelessly away, along with all the empty cans, snack wrappers, and plastic bottles.

I had often considered assembling a photographic series of such items but never did, partly because it seemed such an obvious idea that far too many others must already be doing the same thing. I enjoy the "taxonomic" work of Michael Wolf, for example, collating the rubber boots, coat hangers, stray bits of laundry, and plastic chairs to be found in the backstreets of Hong Kong, and no doubt he had his own precedents to follow and now has hundreds of Wolf-wannabes all over the world. But my resistance was also because I had developed a prejudice against such mechanically cumulative "projects" which, in lesser hands than Wolf's, have in the end nothing much to say about anything other than the desire to have something – anything! – to photograph. Which didn't stop me photographing them myself, of course.

During Covid and in its wake the quantity of lost and tossed facemasks and "disposable" protective gloves in the street became ridiculous, even allowing for the fact that we do live quite near a hospital, where you might expect the odd one to be discarded or dropped. The grimy things are everywhere, almost rivalling the crisp packets in number, and naturally nobody wants to pick them up and do something with them. By "do something" I mean put them in a bin, of course, not create a sculpture or collage, although no doubt someone somewhere has been doing exactly that. Again, I rejected the idea of a photographic "masks and gloves" project, as I expected that dozens of people will have been documenting these strange years in precisely that indirect but handily material way.

But I found that this did prompt me to notice other varieties of lost glove lying around all over the place, and in particular what struck me was that they usually seemed to have made their bid for freedom one at a time. Perhaps the other in the pair gives the escapee a boost on its way out of a pocket or bag, or off the back of a builder's truck? Whatever, single escapes seem to be the runaway's rule, and it occurred to me that I had actually already been photographing them casually whenever they turned up, not least because they seem to retain a level of personality that other lost objects lack (the two giving the finger here date from 2018). I suppose that is because, unlike most articles of clothing, even when discarded they closely resemble what is probably the most emphatically expressive part of our anatomy, and in many accidental configurations they would seem to be trying to communicate something ("Oh, shit... Help! This is not what I imagined...", in the main).

So I started looking and photographing less casually, primarily with my phone, and now I've almost gathered enough to put together a little PDF-only booklet, as proposed towards the end of last year (see Pentagonal Pool on Issuu). It's not ready yet, but will be as soon as I can fill a couple of gaps in the intended sequence. Which, given I'm relying entirely on chance finds, might take longer than I'd intended. But, no, I'm not going to start posing my own gloves in the street: that would be disrespectful – gloves are clearly quick to take offence – and I don't want to inculcate any fantasies of escape.