Dave Willardson's classic album cover for The Beach Boys' CARL AND THE PASSIONS / SO TOUGH (1972)
By MICHAEL PERKINS
SOMETIMES THE WORST LOCATIONS TO PHOTOGRAPH A SUBJECT are the places where the most admirers of that subject are gathered. To put it politely, people generally make composition of an image an uphill slog, crammed together as they might be to appreciate a hobby, an event, or a collectible. This is certainly true with that staple of the weekend festival, the classic car show.
It's one thing to find a bygone ride that you adore. It's something else entirely to visually have it to yourself, with your fellow fans ogling, leaning in, looking into, posing with, or merely passing by in packs. Shooting an entire car at once becomes a virtual impossibility, and so the car has to be, to varying degrees, abstracted, with tighter-framed sections of it standing in for the whole. This usually means a focus on the elaborate grills, exterior contours like fenders or fins, or, in the case of this image, a door/wing window/mirror panel on a Ford Country Squire station wagon. The SoCal sunshine on the day of the shot had already boosted the extreme colors of the treated wood trim and aqua body, making the old girl look like one of those hyper-processed "Greetings from L.A." post cards, and might have made for a great view of the entire side of the car had the area not been clogged with humanity. So the challenge became: how little of the car can I show in a cropped shot and still sell the idea effectively?
Hop In, Kids, Oxnard, California, 2024
The answer actually came to me later, in the editing phase, when my mind traveled sideways to a great cover from the 1972 Beach Boys album Carl & The Passions/So Tough, which featured a similar viewpoint by airbrush painter Dave Willardson, whose work graced dozens of classic records in the early '70's. Being that he wasn't confined to mere reality, Dave was free to show a few fantasy palm trees and a surfboard reflected in the driver's-side window, but the great thing about his conception was how little of the total car he actually showed. I played around with my own shot and decided that less could indeed be more in my case as well. Fans of anything can mar the view of the thing most adored, but that doesn't mean the thing can't be effectively photographed. You just cut away everything that isn't an essential part of the story. It's a fun ride.
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