A single card, a lone sock and an unmatched glove — all subjects at the focus of David Harlan’s on-going series titled “Unpaired.”
Harlan has been documenting lonely socks, gloves and whatever other single items he finds on the sidewalks of Moscow on his long daily walks since 2017.
“Something made me realize I was seeing these single gloves, primarily gloves, but also socks and a few other kinds of things just on the side of the road, on the sidewalks,” Harlan said, “It started to strike me that it was interesting, and I took a few photos, and realized that I could as a photographer, that I could create some visually interesting photographs.”
Once he started noticing the individual items abandoned on the sidewalk, Harlan said they began to intrigue him and lead him to question how they were lost in the first place.
“And then I realized I would never know, so I thought, ‘OK, let’s make up a story,’” he said.
Harlan developed what started as a photo series into a lengthy, multimedia series of the items and pairs them with a fictional story.
“As I started writing them, I realized I was writing a set of interconnected stories where certain characters would appear, reappear, interact some,” he said.
With the series, Harlan, a temporary faculty member with Theatre Arts, wove together two of his passions in life — writing and photography. Once he had the idea to create the story behind the lost objects himself, the world began to connect itself.
“As I started writing them I realized I was writing a set of interconnected stories where certain characters would appear, reappear, interact some,” he said.
With an extensive collection of photos and more than 30,000 words of fictional stories since he started in 2017, Harlan said he hopes to further expand the collection of photo and story pairings until all photos have a story, rounding out the fictional world he created in Moscow.
“The connections that I’ve created in the stories are uniquely Moscow,” Harlan said. “I have experienced in my years of walking around Moscow an interesting phenomenon — people know me as that guy who walks everywhere.”
Harlan, who walks around 10 miles a day every day, said he sees the charac- ters he creates on in his stories on the sidewalks of town — from the kid who lost the sock to the older woman who cannot retrieve her grandson’s glove from the sidewalk in front of her house.
“I can see the connections because I see versions of these people all the time,” he said.
In capturing the photographs, Harlan said he uses his professional-grade cameras, which he carries on his back at all points in time. And he never touches the subject of his shot. The series also stays almost completely contained in Moscow.
Harlan’s work is currently on display at One World Cafe as well as on his site, unpairedstories.com.
“I just happened upon a theme I am uniquely qualified to create given my walking around on small town sidewalks for so much of the time,” Harlan said.
Meredith Spelbring can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @mere0415