Jalopnik: car art

Ferraris! Euro Ladies! Art!

Peter Orosz — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 09:30:00 EST

If there’s one photographer whose pictures of cars approach the lofty heights of art, it’s Richard Morris.

His subject matter—ultra-rare Euro exotics—certainly help, but it’s not like his are the only photos of Pagani Zondas in existence. What’s beautiful about Morris’s work is his relentless pushing of envelopes.

In every single one of his published photos, you can see and feel long hours of thinking and planning executed with great taste. Like his photo of a Lamborghini Murciélago taken at the humongous airship shed in Cardington, Bedfordshire.

Some of his stuff is just plain audacious. He has a photo of both a Porsche Carrera GT and a Koenigsegg which are deviously not in focus yet both work—and are some of the more memorable pictures you’ll ever see of Carrera GT’s and Koenigseggs.

Morris uses strange equipment to capture his images: Leica rangefinder cameras with manual focus lenses, some of which give you razor-thin depths of field. Not a walk in the park when you try to fit a speeding Lotus Exige in there while hanging out of a chase car.

You can see his photography on Flickr and on Parabolique, his portfolio site.

Photo Credit: Richard Morris

Searching for Art in the Porsche 911

Peter Orosz — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 10:30:00 EST

Top Gear presenter James May, in a recent column published in The Telegraph, has called for artistic depictions of cars. We explore the possibilities using his example: the Porsche 911.

“Can art show how a car feels, rather than simply how it looks?” May asks and the short answer is: not really. Cars are notoriously hard to turn into art (bright swatches of paint on racing BMW’s do not count). Whether in photographic or painted or filmed form, the car can almost always be counted on never to transcend itself.

The same cannot be said of humans. Take Steve McCurry’s portrait of Sharbat Gula, better known as the Afghan Girl, which has appeared on the June 1985 cover of National Geographic Magazine and about a million other places since. It is a portrait which transcends magazine covers, girls and Afghanistan to show warfare at its 20^th century industrial worst.

Maybe what’s going on here is that humans, due especially to their facial musculature, can convey a wide range of emotions while cars are simply inanimate objects.

Except that they aren’t. Cars cruise and break and rush and dash and turn and race and oversteer and blow up and rust. Perhaps not quite as broad a range of expression as allowed by subtle twinges of the levator labii superioris muscle, but enough to get started on.

May’s take on the matter:

A skilled portrait photographer can produce an image of a film star and tell us something about what that film star is like as a person. There must be a way of doing this with cars. This is an unexplored avenue of expression that could add to the sum of human understanding, a bit.

This only works with significant cars, of course, because only they have something to tell us. I struggle to see how a Kia Sedona could be depicted as anything other than a spacious mobile box.

As a first exercise in the search of cars as art, I collected a gallery of photos which depict Porsche 911’s in ways which perhaps rise above mere pictures of cars and bare the beauty and flaws of this decades-old icon of German engineering.

This is, of course, an invitation to post better examples here in the comments.

Photo Credit: falxone evans/Flickr, Steve McCurry

Man Builds Detailed Model Cars From Discarded Aluminum Cans

Ben Wojdyla — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:30:00 EST

Meet Sandy Sanderson from New Zealand. Needing something to keep himself occupied after breaking his wrist in a motorcycle accident, he started building amazing model cars from discarded aluminum cans. His incredibly intricate work below.

Sandy's something of a renaissance man; draftsman, guitar player, teacher, motorcyclist, instrument maker and model builder. When he was in a motorcycle accident which shattered his wrist and put him out of action for a while, he needed something to do. While finishing a canned beverage he thought of model airplanes he'd seen made from cans and thought why not make cars out of the same material? And thus was born the CanCar. The "Coriba Climax" below is his first effort and while impressive in its own right you see the cars keep getting more and more technically detailed with each successive build. Very cool hobby Mr. Sanderson, and talk about a unique (though somewhat spendy) Christmas present opportunity.