The Cars

This book looks at a cross section of what cars actually’ look like in a global sampling and how they interact with the environment around them.

“I wanted to show how cars appear in typical street view, which is rarely the subject of photographs. Cars are usually avoided in photography – one waits until a car has exited a view. The ordinary presence of cars is rarely worthy of representation. It’s always the special car, or the extreme traffic jam or, of course, the exciting crash that is being pictured. The Cars pays tribute to the shapes and forms we look at every day. How much time we spend with them, sitting inside them, the endless hours we stare at a dashboard. Even if we don’t own a car ourselves, their presence is unavoidable. Cars are everywhere. Their sheer number is the most crazy thing about them. They appear in our lives with excessive omnipresence. In their volume cars intrude upon public space, and the way they occupy streets and open areas is rarely challenged. Virtually wherever there are people, there are cars and they are visually intermingling in whatever we see. We are looking at the world from a car and cars are in the foreground, the background or in between of what is in our view. Where they are, they add a tone, a note, a presence, a noise to the setting they’re in. […]” – Wolfgang Tillmans