about70under50

 
 


this pattern continued for over a decade.  i acquired shoes in trinidad, israel, cuba, england and all over the united states.  never spending more than $50/pair.


about five years ago, i quit buying sneakers--cold turkey.  i had so many and had learned about the horrible conditions in sneaker factories.  i was also turned off by what the sneaker game had become (people spending lots of money online and in boutiques where everything was served up on a platter).


i know my collection is not the biggest or the first.  but for me it represents young innocent love and desire.  this is my trip down memory lane.  thanks for joining me,



samlover


 

HUGE PROPS to Miguel, Ray and Scott from Photographic Memory for helping me make this documentation project a reality!

when i was a lil boy, i always had one pair of sneakers.  usually with velcro straps and no laces.  when i turned 14, i got my own job and began to buy my own kicks.  back then it was before most of us had access to the internet, before ebay and them existed and before sneaker companies caught onto the idea that people would spend silly amounts for rare shoes.  finding unique sneaks was not so much about how much you could/would spend, but more about how far you would go, how deep you would dig.  i used to go on journeys, politicking my way into backrooms and uncovering sneakers that shoestores had previously thought were unsellable.  i’d show up at high school in em and people would go crazy wanting to know where i got them and bugging out when i told them how cheap i had got em for.  some of those pairs now look commonplace, as they have been reissued.  others look goofy.