Auto Show

Ford unveiling, Media Day, Canadian International Auto Show, Toronto, Feb. 2018

SOME PEOPLE MEDITATE, TAKE LONG HIKES INTO THE WILDERNESS OR PRAY. I take pictures of cars. We all have our different ways of relaxing and finding our emotional and spiritual equilibrium. Which means, I suppose, that a car show is my idea of a pilgrimage.

I thought that last year would be my last one with accreditation for media day at the big auto show here in Toronto. I was resigned to having to take in the cars in the crush of regular ticket buyers later in the week, but I took a chance and applied for accreditation as myself, author of my social media and proprietor of this blog. To my great shock my request wasn't denied.

Media Day, Canadian International Auto Show, Toronto, Feb. 2018

The great advantage of media day is that the cars are all clean and new and detailed, free from fingerprints and the wear and tear of public display. And as long as you stay away from the crowd of writers, photographers, bloggers, vloggers, presenters and video crews, they can be framed in the camera viewfinder almost human-free and lit with the best that showroom lighting tech has to offer.

As ever, it's the concept cars and halo models and racetrack thoroughbreds that catch your eye. I remain enthralled by Ford's new GT, despite its demotion from centre stage to the performance division annex. But my real satori are the vintage autos, like the 1967 Mazda Cosmo pulled from some warehouse or private collection to help launch a new car with sporty ambitions, or the sheer madness of GM's Firebird III, plucked from their Motorama show and the '50s vision of the future.

Old cars are full of these gripping details, like the exuberantly overbuilt rear end of a Cadillac Eldorado coupe, or the broad gills on an E-Type or the tidier ones on a Shelby Cobra, set just above a braided set of exhaust pipes. This is high end car porn, and a reminder that I really need to get my license one day.

Media Day, Canadian International Auto Show, Toronto, Feb. 2018

Grounded

Ash Wednesday self-portrait, Toronto, 2017

I'VE BEEN STICKING CLOSE TO HOME SINCE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, but a new round of travel assignments have started and I'm off to Belfast this afternoon. That doesn't mean my cameras have stayed in their cases, and in any case everybody needs to exercise if they're going to stay in shape.

My main venue has been the Art Gallery of Ontario, where I've spent many more Saturdays wandering around to keep out of the winter chill while my youngest daughter was at her weekly art class. As usual, the big attraction isn't so much the art on the walls as the people looking at the art - my favorite subjects, caught surreptitiously with my little Fuji camera set to waist level viewfinder mode.

Art Gallery of Ontario, Winter 2017

I don't find winter streets terribly evocative, but one morning after the snow had melted a warm front moved in and brought a thick fog with it. I grabbed my camera and headed down to the park at the end of the street.

Earlscourt Park, February 2017

I'd be lying if I said I was housebound all winter - I was invited to appear as a guest on a TV show to talk about movies, which meant an unexpected overnight trip to the suburbs of Burlington, Vermont. I woke up early on the morning we taped and headed out for a wander around the streets near the hotel.

Williston, VT, January 2017

Finally, Motorama came around again this year, and with it a chance to shoot rat rods, muscle cars and hot rods, lovingly restored and put on display by their owners in a big hall in the convention centre out by the airport. More than the big auto show, this is probably my favorite car event of the year here.

Motorama, March 2017

Auto Show

OVER A DECADE AGO I WAS ASSIGNED TO SHOOT MY FIRST AUTO SHOW, and it was a huge part of my reawakened passion for cars. Media Day at the Canadian International Auto Show was a much bigger affair then, spreading through the whole of the downtown convention centre and into the Skydome nearby. As a photographer, it gave you the only chance you'd have to shoot the cars in a relatively uncrowded setting, before thousands of hands had run over the the paint and smeared the windows and lights.

It's a smaller auto show now, for a lot of reasons not worth going into here, and even Media Day was scaled back this year, but I had my accreditation again and wasn't going to miss an opportunity to capture the details and art unique to auto design, or the peculiar spectacle of an auto show in general, and the Media Day in particular.

This year was the first one I was under no obligation to shoot anything to illustrate an article on upcoming auto trends, so I decided to enter the show without a safety net. I put a fisheye lens on one of my DSLRs and a LensBaby on the other, and didn't bother packing a standard zoom lens for backup. I was hoping to get something that represented how I remember the highlights of an auto show - a record of the best bits of the cars I'd seen, recalled in a feverish reverie.

It's probably no surprise that there were no shots of Civics or Fiestas or Elantras on my camera's memory cards when I got home. Race cars and concepts and classic cars buffed and shined lovingly by proud owners; this is what got me really excited at that first auto show media day back in 2006, and it's what will probably keep pulling me back to convention centres and parking lots, museums and golf courses and public parks over and over again, with or without my camera.

This was probably also my last year with press accreditation, since the source of my credentials for the last six years decided that auto show coverage is no longer justified by the readership numbers. Maybe someone else might ask me to cover the Canadian International Auto Show again, but right now it looks like the wide open spaces of Media Day are over for me, and I'll be back to ogling the cars in the midst of the crowds again.

Los Angeles: Cars

Lightning McQueen, Petersen Automotive Museum, Los Angeles, Nov. 2016

THE PETERSEN AUTOMOTIVE MUSEUM WAS CLOSED the last time I was in Los Angeles, so I made it a priority to get there when I finally made it back. There are a lot of great car museums in the world, but the Petersen is somehow special, located as it is in a city where cars and roads are essential to its municipal and mythic identity.

I'm not hard to please when it comes to car museums. Put a few dozen really nice autos under decent lighting and I'll lapse into my customary fugue state, eyes locked on details and trim, intently taking in the lines running back from the headlights and grille to the trunk lid and rear bumper. The automobile is probably the most iconic bit of design of the previous century. Which is probably why this century is producing so few really beautiful cars; the time of the auto as peak technology and fetish item might be passing. Which makes my appreciation of places like the Petersen so fervent.

Also, they have the BatCycle.

Petersen Automotive Museum, Los Angeles, Nov. 2016

The most stunning room in the museum was devoted to the Bugattis - almost a couple dozen of them, from the earliest roadsters to the Chiron, with pride of place given to the Atlantic, an art deco masterpiece of a car and one of the two originals known to survive, which managed to be even more stunning in person than any of the hundreds of pictures I'd seen over the years.

Bugattis, Petersen Automotive Museum, Los Angeles, Nov. 2016

I couldn't imagine living in L.A. without a car, though I know it's possible (if highly inconvenient.) Unlike my hometown, though, it's a place where the lack of rain and snow and road salt keeps cars on the road much longer than I'm used to, and car culture of every type, from hot rods to supercars to low riders and exotics, can be glimpsed everywhere.

I could spend a year or more in Los Angeles just documenting the car culture if what I saw from the back window of my Uber or while walking the eerily people-less streets meant anything. On my first morning in town, wandering down the streets beneath the Hollywood sign, I took snapshots of the real rides people use in L.A., parked under the high, specular California sunshine.

Cars, Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles, Nov. 2016

Years ago, watching the original Gone In Sixty Seconds, it struck me that L.A. was the real-life version of the Pixar movie Cars, where there was a whole infrastructure and support system devoted to servicing cars, meshed carefully with the one that kept human life viable under the desert sun. These cars looked more at home here than the people; after all, so much had been done to tame the landscape to their needs, and even with a bumper askew or under a tarp, they looked like they took pride of place in the landscape, masters of their domain.