When New Balance brought three new iterations of the 1890 to NOIRFONCE, we didn't want to photograph them ourselves. We wanted to see what would happen if we handed them to people whose eyes we trust and then stepped out of the way. So we teamed up with four photographers, soaptwo, Adriandglez, Souloner and Rocío Aguirre, and gave each of them the same simple kit and the same open brief.
The shoes were the 1890 White, the 1890 Black and the 1890 Slate Grey. All three sit on the ABZORB sole unit borrowed from the 2002, with mesh, suede and synthetic overlays edged in metallic silver. They are quiet colourways on a shoe whose contours do most of the work, which made them a good starting point for four very different ways of looking.
This is the first of two posts. Here we share a first look at what the photographers made and the question the project left us with. In Part 2, we'll take you inside Gallery Noir, the launch night where we showed the full body of work.
The Brief
Each photographer received three pairs of shoes and three rolls of analog film, and the only instruction was to shoot the sneakers in their own way. We gave them no moodboard, no shot list and no product angles to tick off.
Film was a deliberate choice. Three rolls means a limited number of frames, and every one of them has to be decided before the shutter goes. There's no screen to check and no second take that costs nothing, so each photographer had to commit to an idea early and live with it until the rolls came back from the lab. For a running shoe built around comfort and speed, being slowed down to the pace of a film camera felt like the right kind of contradiction.
Four Ways of Looking
The results are incredible, and we can't wait to show you everything. The full series, and the book that collects them, belong to Gallery Noir, so for now here is a first look at each photographer's chapter.
Rocío Aguirre (@rocioaguirrev) was handed three pairs of sneakers and returned with something closer to a diary. Shot as an editorial of her own summer, her chapter treats the sneakers less as the subject and more as recurring characters, worn into the same light, the same skin and the same unhurried days that make up a season. The fashion instinct is unmistakable, with styling, colour and framing handled by someone dressing herself rather than a product. Underneath the ease sits the question the whole book keeps circling back to, which is how much of a summer can still be invented from three fixed points, and in Rocío's chapter the answer is most of it.
Adrián (@adriandglez) wrote the quietest chapter in the book, and that restraint is the point. What began as a bigger idea was pared back to what mattered most: the sneaker itself, set against natural materials and softened by a kind of light that only comes from working with its surroundings rather than against them. Stone, wood, skin and leaf leave the shoe's premium quality in conversation with textures that owe nothing to a studio. The result is fewer images and more attention, and a reminder that the limitation is sometimes what ends up sharpening the work.
Souloner (@souloneryounger) gave himself a guideline that came with an engine. He photographed the sneakers inside his own car, a '90s restoration project he has clearly given as much attention to as anything he shoots. The result reads less like a product story and more like a conversation between two objects built on the same instinct, where nothing is rushed, nothing looks synthetic and the materials are left to do the talking. Leather meets leather and stitching meets stitching, over thirty years apart, and somehow they speak the same language. The brief gave him three pairs of shoes, and he supplied the room they'd feel most at home in.
soaptwo (@soaptwo) went straight to the material. There's no scene and no narrative, just the sneaker broken down into surface, texture and edge, shot raw and set against itself in contrast: suede next to leather, matte against sheen, shadow cut hard against highlight. It's the most literal answer in the book to the question the manifesto opens with, which is what's left to say once you strip away everything but the object and its opposite. Reduced to their rawest form, the three pairs somehow become more expressive.
What struck us when the scans came in was how little the four series have in common, even though they started from exactly the same three pairs and the same amount of film.
Does Creative Liberty Really Exist?
The project opened a conversation we didn't expect, and it's one we found fascinating. On paper, we gave the photographers total freedom, but every one of them was still working inside a frame: three pairs of a specific shoe, a fixed number of exposures, a brand on the tongue and a store that would eventually show the work. Freedom with a product in the shot is never quite the same as freedom with an empty page.
And yet the limits seemed to sharpen the work rather than flatten it. With so few frames, nobody could shoot everything, so each of them had to decide what the shoe meant to them before deciding how to light it. The constraints didn't tell them what to make, but they did force them to choose, and the choosing is where their personalities show.
Maybe creative liberty was never the absence of rules. Maybe it's the space a person carves out inside them, and the most honest thing a brief can do is make that space as wide as possible and then trust the people in it. We don't have a final answer, and we'd rather keep asking the question with the photographers themselves at Gallery Noir.
Coming Next: Gallery Noir
This is only a sneak peek, and the full series deserves more room than a blog post can give it.
In Part 2, we'll take you to our recap of Espacio Amen in Malasaña -if you can't make it, of course) which we will be turning into Gallery Noir for one night to show each photographer's complete body of work. For now, check out a few pieces below, and the flyer for our upcoming event:
The New Balance 1890 White, Black and Slate Grey are available now at NOIRFONCE, online and in store. If you're interested in how photographers think about objects, read our piece on Paolo Roversi's Doubts at the MOP Foundation.
