January 2010: Is what looks like paradise always paradise? The Las Cuevas Beach on the north coast of Trinidad looks like paradise. Peaceful, refreshing, inviting to stroll along the beach ...

But what you find is not always fit for paradise. Some of my pictures of the month feature pairs of shoes discarded by their owners for reasons unknown or not always easy to guess: a pair of black shoes, well kept, good looking though a bit old-fashioned, but nicely placed in a border in San Diego; another pair of snickers, worn out and carelessly thrown away. In summer last year, a pair of white women shoes were placed on a fenced wall in a street in Frankfurt. Last December on a cold evening in San Francisco in Sutter Street, I first saw a pair of dancing shoes and then a few meters further up the road a pair of evening gloves. What were the stories of all the people who stepped out of their shoes and left them behind? What do people do in a city when they continue without their shoes? And in a winter night after they lost their gloves? We can only guess.

The lonely shoe on Las Cuevas Beach may have had a very different story? Most likely, it was stolen by the sea from someone, leaving behind the other member of the pair together with a desperate owner deprived of his red snickers. The size of the show tells us that the owner was tall, maybe a strong athlete, now without the gear to exercise. And the sea soon got tired of playing with the new toy and spit it out on a beach, in Las Cuevas, of all beaches. Poor lonely shoe, poor left-behind shoe, poor one-shoe owner ...

But it gets worse; see here for the next part of the story ...