Consumed In Image, car portrait photographs.

Strange things happen with apparently banal objects in Car Portrait Photographs. The photographed cars seem to vibrate and sweat as human machines who are about to say something. Like KITT, the artificially intelligent car that could communicate and interact with its driver in the American television 80s series ‘Knight Rider’.

Car Portrait Photographs were taken with a Minox camera. This ‘spy camera’ is about the size of a cigarette lighter and it records captured images on extremely small reversal film (8×11 mm). Its production began in Riga (Letland), running from 1937 until 1943. During WWII cameras were produced under both Russian and German occupation. Later, in 1948, the manufacturing process was re-established in West Germany. The Minox miniature camera came also to good use as a spy camera by both sides during the Cold War.

Mechanical Imagery.
I believe, that today’s cars is the precise equivalent to the great Gothic cathedrals. That is to say, a great creation of the epoch, which was concveived with passion by unknown artists and which is used, in image if not in actuality, by an entire nation, which with the automoibile prepares and approaches a magical object.
-Roland Barthes-

Consumed In Image: Mechanical Imagery
12 Din A4 colour copies of photographs of details of cars in a presentation display book, numbered/50, signed, (Amsterdam) 1999
EUR 43,50