They were the beauties of their time

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You can find them again and again. The sleeping beauties, the remains of early luxury cars and the contemporary witnesses from the early days of the automobile. They gather dust in old barns, somewhere on the roadside of a classic car fan's service station or in the Australian outback, forgotten among the bushes and desert grass.

Photographically, of course, my focus is on rust, moss and discoloration. I combined the rust colors with backgrounds in pale black and white and discolored them. This places them visually in the center.

A Thin Lizzy almost integrated into the landscape, almost 100 years old, stands behind an Australian farmer's barn as the skeleton of one of the first motor vehicles to be produced on an assembly line in the USA. In the 1920s, the photographs were black and white. Nevertheless, my picture is characterized by red and yellow. A symbol for the unstoppable rusting of metal and here for the Australian red and yellow landscape. The bright sun nevertheless seems to make the remains of the right-hand headlight glow again. A rarity.

The Plymouth lets the viewer literally feel the coarse, rough surface that has been heavily eaten away by rust. Hard image contrasts together with the intensification of the rust colors do the rest. Rust never sleeps.

 

The old American road cruisers fill the picture. They were “giant ships” on the roads. The low point of view in combination with a strong wide-angle lens magnifies the effect of the vehicles.

The photograph of the Ford Edsel is dominated by shades of green. The viewer can literally see the water running down the former highly polished chrome bumpers. Moss has grown in these areas. The vehicle was parked and, exposed to the wind and weather, was simply left to integrate itself into the landscape over time.