Autophoto: Cars & Photography, 1900 to Now

FROM THE BOOK

A panorama framed by the rectangle of the windscreen. A long ribbon of asphalt stretching into the distance until it vanishes over the horizon. For more than a century, we have been able to travel the world by car and capture such an image from this “camera box” on wheels.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the automobile and photography—two instruments for shaping the landscape, two mechanisms of traction and attraction—paved the way for modern society by introducing new rituals and new velocities. While photography allows us to have and record multiple points of view, to “memorize” movement and to leave traces, the automobile enables us move through space. Photography, which immobilizes, has benefited from the automobile, which provides mobility. And although cars and photography are both continually evolving, they have in fact taken parallel paths in order to increase their mastery over space and time. “Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated,” wrote Jean Baudrillard.

But let us go back to the beginning. A little more than two hundred years ago, the brothers Nicéphore and Claude Niépce became interested in both the internal combustion engine and the phenomena of light. The two inveterate inventors developed the Pyréolophore, the forerunner of the internal combustion engine, which was driven by heat-expanded air and fueled by a combination of coal, resin, and oil. Patented in 1807, the Pyréolophore was mainly designed to propel boats. Unfortunately, Claude’s incessant research drove them deeper into debt and Nicéphore discontinued the engine projects to turn his efforts to heliography, a method for reproducing images that involved engraving and a camera obscura. Sometime around 1826, the world’s first photographed image was born. Taken from the window of Niépce’s house in Saint-Loup-de-Varennes in the Saone-et-Loire region and titled View from the Window at Le Gras, it was obtained by coating a pewter plate with bitumen of Judea. Louis Daguerre, William Henry Fox Talbot, and Hippolyte Bayard would go on to perfect this new invention—officially dated 1839—through the use of different techniques (daguerreotype, calotype) and materials (silver plate, mat paper). Around 1880, Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey took on another challenge, the study of motion, and invented chronophotography, which enabled them to break down and capture the movements of a body or an animal in action. On the automotive side, experimental research on engines had continued throughout the century, but it was not until 1889 that a four-stroke engine was developed by Deutz AG. A double revolution was thus underway. The automobile and photography progressed side by side during the twentieth century. Industrialization and mass production came along to make both widely accessible to the general public. The hippomobile gradually disappeared as the automobile took over. The latter was indeed all the more popular because, as urban planner Marc Desportes points out, it “obeys your every command, drives you anywhere you want, at any time of day or night. In that way, cars are similar to horses, but to horses that never tire and have the power of four, of eight of their kind … That is why they engender a feeling of action and freedom. That is why they differ from trains, which impose their routes and schedules and create a form of passivity in passengers, who, in spite of themselves, are forced to participate in a huge, inflexible, regimented machine.” This new kind of horsepower led to the first speed records being set: in Achères, France, where the 100 km/h mark was first crossed in 1899, then in Ostend, Belgium, where the 130 km/h barrier was broken in 1903, and in Daytona Beach, Florida, where 170 km/h was almost reached in 1905.

At first, due to their cost, cars were owned mainly by the well-to-do. The latter complained about the state of the roads, most of which were nothing more than dirt tracks that left much to be desired. Routes had to be organized for driving, networks had to established with roads that had to be named and mapped. In 1900, the brothers André and Édouard Michelin began topographical surveys in order to identify France’s roads and evaluate their condition. Then, in the 1930s, they set out on a mission to photograph the world’s major routes. All over the planet, from Damascus to Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile to Timbuktu via Berlin and Prague, they found the same thing: roads were dangerous, unsuitable for driving, and lacking in any kind of convenience. They needed to be rebuilt, enlarged and made safe. Little by little, a web would be woven, and expanded to cover all of the continents, even if it meant creating more and more traffic. Today we are a long way from the clouds of dust thrown up by a vehicle that announced the arrival of a more or less benevolent presence in the village. A long way, as well, from the tracks left by the Black Cruise (28,000 kilometers across the Africa) and the Yellow Cruise (30,000 kilometers across Asia) organized by Citroën in 1924 and 1931, respectively. Before routes were inundated with asphalt, obliterating the tire tracks left in the dirt, cars once drew a sort of Ariadne’s thread reconnecting us to space and time.

The rising popularity of the automobile, initiated in France by small firms such as Panhard & Levassor and De Dion-Bouton, took a decisive turn in 1910. Industrialization and the development of new manufacturing methods—in particular, the introduction of the assembly line—made it possible to meet both the growing demand and the requirements of profitability. The principles of scientific management formulated by the American engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor were first put into practice in the United States by Henry Ford for his famous Model T. “Fordism” followed on the heels of “Taylorism” and would turn the city of Detroit, Michigan into the automotive capital of the world. A new economy was emerging and photographers on both sides of the Atlantic were documenting the social history that accompanied it.

With the arrival of Kodak’s light and easy-to-maneuver box camera in 1888, then the Pocket Kodak in 1895 and, above all, the Brownie in 1900—which sold for less than a dollar—the camera industry and the sensitive surface (negatives) market began to take off. Improvements in shutter speeds and instantaneity led to reduced exposure times, which finally made it possible to capture a subject in motion. In 1925, the first camera to use the 24 × 36 mm format, the famous Leica, was brought out by the German engineer Oskar Barnack. Major advances were also being made in the realm of color. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the first autochromes were able to reproduce reality as it appeared to the naked eye, and they were soon followed by other techniques in the 1920s and 1930s (Agfacolor, Kodachrome, Ektachrome, etc.). Although, at the time, black and white still predominated, color gave photographers a new medium for artistic expression.

By now roads had branched out into highways, into bypasses, with gas stations, parking lots, motels, drive-ins, and more. This first conquest of space accelerated in the 1950s: the aim was to go ever faster, ever farther. Then the mythical road trip was born, and after the publication of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in 1957 and Robert Frank’s The Americans in 1958, two of the Beat Generation’s iconic books, it became the thing to do. With the rise of consumer society in the 1960s, the automobile became the symbol of independence and freedom, as well as a status symbol, which caught the eye of many a photographer. “I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals: I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as a purely magical object,” was Roland Barthes’s analysis. Each year millions of worshipers flocked to Paris, Frankfurt, Shanghai, Detroit, Geneva, Los Angeles, and Tokyo, for the high mass of the auto shows. There they discovered the latest innovations in traveling, positioning, and visions for the future, to continually push the frontiers of the open road.

The intimate world of the home transposed into a mobile habitat is exposed to all kinds of gazes. It may sometimes even trap its occupants: when unleashed on the road, the steel exoskeleton, which is made corporeal with its users, may also become, without any warning, a devastating and at times deadly metallic shell. Left to rot in the landscape or rust in the scrap yard, this exoskeleton itself becomes perishable.

What cars have spawned above all in the last two decades, is an ever-expanding monster. Its arteries are becoming more and more clogged, creating such pollution that it is considered as much of a threat as reckless driving. Similarly, in the field of photography—a field that was to become more and more fertile with the advent of digital technology and the Internet—congestion has also reached a critical point. This type of expansion, across space and time, has been undergoing an acceleration of another kind, linked to hybrid technologies (gasoline-electricity, phone-cameras), connectivity, and social networks (carpooling, photo sharing). In addition, a new era is already on the horizon: that of the semi- or fully autonomous car loaded with algorithms, cameras, and sensors.

But before this next transformation allows us to finally let go of the steering wheel, let’s pause. The photographic series in the exhibition AUTOPHOTO tell a story, of how the automobile has, over the last century, through the eye of the camera, altered the landscape, and with its recurrent themes, has forever changed our society and our way of seeing things. - Translated from the French by Jennifer Kaku