Bouncing around… I found ANOTHER @nytimes article…this one was written by the one and only @questlove supreme…titled “Collecting Is an Act of Devotion, and Creation”…and if you want to gloss over my synopsis, just know that I think Questlove is an absolute treasure of a human being…
The very beginning starts out with…”collecting…items became a way to prevent the past from slipping away. A collection starts as a protest against the passage of time and ends as a celebration of it.” And I’ve always kind of known this, implicitly, with sneakers (at least). The majority of the pairs I looked for when I first started collecting were the pairs that I owned as a kid…why? I’d venture to say that all of us who ‘collect’ start there.
Another part that hit me kinda hard…“When our lives turned inward as the pandemic began in March 2020, my mind turned toward the past. It felt as if the natural place to go because the future was unclear at best and the present painful…objects in my collection…gave off sparks of comfort.” This part definitely resonated me as the pandemic is when my mind went so easily into the notion of ‘sneaker cards’. I collected sports cards as a kid (when everything was ‘safe’) and found a natural subject with my (current) preoccupation with sneakers. Funny how that worked out, huh?
And finally… ”There’s a personal question that I ask all the time, too: Am I only the sum of all the things that I have collected? And if so, shouldn’t I declare it proudly? These projects reminded me that legacy matters, and that mine is largely about illuminating the legacy of the culture that made me. It gives me hope for a future with the confidence to hold the past — to protect it and preserve it, to explain it and elevate it, to keep its light shining brightly even as it drifts out into the sea of time.”
Photography credit: @rebeccapietri and @jeffreyhensonscales for the @nytimes