58 Chevys

This week I have started to think more about trying to nail down a subject that I can continue with for awhile. My natural instinct was to go with something that has always interested me and that has increased in the last few years: cars. I have my dad to thank for turning me into the car guy that I am. He too has always had a passion for cars since he grew up in the era of big fins, lots of chrome, hundreds of horses under the hood, and a lifestyle that revolved around who drove what. The OPEC oil embargo and the environmental movement changed that lifestyle and diminished the passion for cars. While this was a good thing due to the increased efficiency or modern cars and much better air to breathe, those cars and that lifestyle is a distinctive era in American history. Some of that passion is coming back as Mustangs, Camaros, Chargers, and Challengers once again (and possibly for the last time) populate the streets. I go to several car shows every year and I think that the car hobby is alive and well. Photographing cars has also long been a passion of mine and so one of my ongoing projects will be to photograph the cars of yesterday and hopefully get pictures of cars that are rusting away in backyards, junkyards, and old Yankee woods as well as freshly restored classics. I feel strongly about the emotions these cars once evoked in their owners and I love to see the "faces" that cars wear as they age.

With that idea in mind, I have included two pictures here of two 1958 Chevys. The black and white image (bottom) is of a very sad, rusting 58 sitting in my next door neighbor's backyard. He once thought he would restore the car and still hopes to do that someday, but in the meantime this car sits forlorn in a leaky shed. I took this picture (in digital) while I was in high school and re shot it (in film) last year for Frank's Intro to Photo class. The top picture is one that I took recently after seeing it in a parking lot. The brightness of the paint and the chrome always draws me in. I love to see how beautiful and how sad these cars can look and I hope this is something that I document for years to come.