a photo essay of forgotten gloves
2019 - ongoing
It started with a pink disposable glove.
I found it on a frozen autumn evening in 2019, flattened a sett stone road in Breda like a crumpled heart. That first glove haunted me with its loneliness and abandonment. Was it from a street cleaner? Was it torn off by a nurse rushing home from a late shift?
Soon I began seeing them everywhere, a knitted glove fused into the ground in a crossroad in Budapest, corroded after days or weeks of rain; a construction worker’s glove lying by a window like a smoking gesture in Venice; a winter glove hanging on a wooden sculpture or a garden fence in Zurich, hanging lost items where owners might reclaim them is kind of customary in Switzerland.
Over several years across cities, I’ve gathered a lot of these lonely gloves. Most come from the streets in Budapest and Zurich, the two places where I have spent the most time in recent years.
Each glove tells a silent story, I photograph them where they fall, using white tape to mark their accidental altars on the print to commemorate them. These lost objects are frozen moments that carry a split-second when someone was passing through.
In our rush forward, we’re surrounded by quiet evidence that lives intersect here and now, in the most fleeting ways. These gloves are footprints in reverse, reminders of where we’ve been, and what we’ve left behind.
