“The modern camera and the car were both products of the Second Industrial Revolution,” says Philippe Seclier, one of the curators behind the exhibition Autophoto, which opened this year at the Fondation Cartier in Paris. “And both gave us a new perception of space and time.”
Featuring around 500 works, Autophoto examines the history of photography’s relationship with the automobile, from 1900 to the present day. It is a vast subject, which Seclier and his co-curators approach thematically as well as chronologically, moving from pioneers of 20th Century photography, such as Man Ray and Brassaï, to contemporary practitioners including the Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto.
Jacques Henri-Lartigue was one of many artists who became obsessed with the car’s aesthetic in the early 20th Century (Credit: Ministère de la Culture, Jacques-Henri Lartigue)
Although the world’s first motorcar was invented during the 1880s by the German engineer Karl Benz, it wasn’t until the early 20th Century that cars became widely available
The exhibition not only tells the shifting story of society’s attitudes towards motorcars, but also provides an overview of important developments within the century’s photography itself.
The show begins in 1900 because, although the world’s first motorcar was invented during the 1880s by the German engineer Karl Benz, it wasn’t until the early 20th Century that cars became widely available.
By 1902, aerodynamic automobiles capable of high speeds, such as the Baker Electric Torpedo, were already competing in races – and the French amateur photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue was one of many artists who became obsessed with their sleek, streamlined aesthetic.
Autophoto contains one of Lartigue’s most famous images, which he captured during the Grand Prix of the Automobile Club de France on a circuit at Dieppe, by swinging his camera parallel to the road while following the car’s movement. Technically, it is a failure: although the driver and his vehicle’s bodywork are both in focus, the road and spectators are blurry, and the rear wheels are distorted.
Yet these ‘mistakes’ only enhance the brilliant impression conveyed by the image of travelling at breakneck speed. By 1912, when Lartigue captured this shot, horsepower must have seemed terribly 19th Century. Indeed, the Grand Prix he was photographing was won by a Peugeot driven at speeds of more than 100mph (160kph).
Lost highways
Speed is, of course, only one of many beguiling associations of the motorcar. Another is the romance of the open road. Driving along an empty highway still evokes a sense of freedom and release from the humdrum pressures and concerns of everyday life.
The evolution of this idea can be traced back at least as far as the Beat generation of the 1950s, and is epitomised by the title of US writer Jack Kerouac’s epoch-defining novel, On the Road (1957). The following year witnessed the publication of The Americans, a seminal photography book – indeed, arguably the most influential of the 20 th Century – by the US photographer Robert Frank.
The exhibition shows the shifting developments in photography as well as the car itself (Credit: Ray K Metzker)
To create this epic work, which documented every echelon of US society, Frank secured a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1955 to fund a series of road trips across the United States over the following two years. During his travels, he took 28,000 shots, before selecting just 83 for the final series of The Americans. One of them recorded an assembly line in a Ford Motor Company factory known as the River Rouge Plant in Detroit.
Frank’s photographs of the Ford plant reveal the sweaty reality of building vehicles that offered to millions the possibility of mobility and escape
Although this well-known photograph is not included in Autophoto, another shot, also taken by Frank inside the same factory, is. It reminds us that there is nothing dreamy or idealised about Frank’s photographs of the Ford plant. Rather, they reveal the tough, sweaty reality of building vehicles that offered to millions the possibility of mobility and escape. “It was a very strong experience to get into the Ford factory,” Frank later recalled. “It was in the summer and it was so hot in the factory and the noise was so fantastic. It was really like a little hell.”
As well as documenting the production of the automobile, Autophoto examines the impact of the motorcar upon the landscape: the exhibition is full of images of seemingly endless highways and gridlocked roads. For instance, a photograph from 2004, by the Canadian Edward Burtynsky, presents the awesome, spiralling form of a complex highway interchange in Shanghai, in the manner of a Romantic painting depicting the grandeur of the ‘sublime’ natural world.
Lee Friedlander used parts of the vehicle, such as the windscreen or the front window frames, as devices to structure his compositions (Credit: Lee Friedlander)
Another brilliant work tackling this theme is the US artist Ed Ruscha’s series of 34 black-and-white aerial photographs of vacant car parks within Los Angeles. Thirtyfour Parking Lots was one of 17 artist’s books that Ruscha published during the ‘60s and ‘70s (“I want to be the Henry Ford of book making,” he once said).
According to Ruscha, the entire series was created in 45 minutes one Sunday morning in 1967, when he hired a commercial photographer and a helicopter, and took to the skies above LA. “I began to notice swimming pools and parking lots were two elements of the city that really impressed me,” he later recalled.
The finished pictures typify his dispassionate, deadpan style. Because the lots are empty, they have a melancholic atmosphere. They also play a sophisticated aesthetic game: the lines and grids of the white lines, demarcating individual spaces, have an abstract quality. As a result, they engage with so-called ‘hard-edge’ geometric abstraction, which was then in vogue among Ruscha’s contemporaries such as Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly.
‘Gradual disenchantment’
Like Ruscha, many great 20th Century photographers, from Man Ray to Martin Parr, have felt inspired to make inventive pictures of cars and the culture of cars. The doyen of the genre, though, is arguably William Eggleston, the debonair photographer from Memphis, Tennessee, known as the master of the ‘poetic snapshot’. Eggleston’s experiments with colour forced people to recognise that colour photography could be as much of an art form as black-and-white.
The doyen of car culture images is the Memphis, Tennessee photographer William Eggleston (Credit: Eggleston Artistic Trust, Memphis)
In the mid-‘60s, Eggleston and his friend, the museum director Walter Hopps, began taking road trips around the West Coast. While Hopps would be at the wheel, Eggleston would sit in the passenger seat, his camera at the ready. Over time, the seemingly casual images that he took coalesced into a series known as Los Alamos.
Six images from the series are included in Autophoto. The example illustrated here, which was probably taken in 1974, showcases Eggleston’s sixth sense for spotting impromptu, off-the-cuff compositions in the world around him: the parked car is almost a mirror image of the picture of a Ford Torino in the billboard above, while Eggleston surely relished the concentration of so many subtly different greens. These range from the blueish sea-green of the Ford Torino in the advertisement to the dark green of the wall, which complements the mint green of the New Generation poster and the racing green of the stationary car on the street.
Eggleston’s photographs are characterised by their casual flair and nonchalance (Credit: Eggleston Artistic Trust, Memphis)
The story of photography’s relationship with the motorcar is one of gradual disenchantment
Eggleston’s photographs are often characterised by a kind of casual flair – a contemporary incarnation, you could say, of the Italian Renaissance concept of sprezzatura (nonchalance or studied carelessness). Many of his photographs of cars appear informal and fragmentary, focusing on, say, a headlight or a rear-view mirror. This also appealed to other 20th Century photographers: the American Lee Friedlander, for instance, took images inside a motorcar that used parts of the vehicle, such as the windscreen or the front window frames, as devices to structure his compositions.
In broader terms, though, the story of photography’s relationship with the motorcar is one of gradual disenchantment. For much of the last century, the automobile represented something glamorous and exciting – as witnessed by those photographs, featured in Autophoto, which juxtapose cars with film stars such as Marilyn Monroe or Steve McQueen. Cars were status symbols, as in Malick Sidibe’s pictures of well-dressed, beautiful Malian men and women posing on bonnets. Indeed, for many people, cars remain potent status symbols today.
In Malick Sidibe’s pictures of well-dressed Malian men and women posing on bonnets, cars are status symbols (Credit: Malick Sidibé)
Yet, as the 20th Century wore on, the reputation of the automobile started to decline, as concerns grew about the impact of cars upon the environment. Besides, is there anyone in the world who enjoys being stuck in traffic?
This re-evaluation of the car is reflected in Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto’s series, On the Beach. In 1990, Sugimoto visited New Zealand. One day, walking on a beautiful, deserted beach, he came across hundreds of mysterious objects, strewn across the sand. Closer inspection revealed that they were old-fashioned car parts, probably dating from the ‘60s, eroded by the waves into strange, almost melted-looking forms. Struck by their wondrous shapes, and elegiac character, Sugimoto began to photograph them, creating a kind of memento mori for the automobile industry.
Justine Kurland’s 2012 photograph reflects the declining reputation of the car in the contemporary era (Credit: Justine Kurland)
“The sight of crafted objects rotting away is at once dreadful and beautiful,” Sugimoto later said. “It does not take long for civilisation to decay. Just a few decades are enough for a car, one symbol of our modern civilisation, to decompose into nothing.”
Alastair Sooke is art critic and columnist of The Daily Telegraph
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