The automobile has long held a special place in American culture. Within the national psyche, it is an icon of ingenuity and industry. For the individual, the car is more than just a motor. It is a symbol for rights-of-passage, spatial mobility, economic status, perhaps freedom itself – to express, to choose, to venture. And so, for many it is representative overall of identity. Ultimately, these transports do more than cart their riders. They summarize their life's journey. The attributes of drivers are then often reflected in their vehicles. Just as their human counterparts may have scars or tattoos, these machines are marked with unique story-telling gashes and highly personalized décor. Phil Jung with his wonderful photographic eye hones in on these parallels to reveal qualities that are simultaneously very private and plainly universal: a compulsion to have, a search for faith, a hope dashed, a ceaseless aging, or a longing to be entertained, to feel loved, to be anything in the world but stationary
-Anthem Salgado (Writer and Fulbright-Hays Recipient 2008)
A car's interior is both a public and private space. The interior, littered with personal articles, offers a portrait of its owner, while the aging exterior conveys imminent decay.
The gasoline-powered vehicles that were introduced in 1896 represented freedom, hope, exploration and independence -- quintessentially American ideals. By 1947, when the photographer Wright Morris made his image of an aging Model T, those early ideals had already begun to deteriorate. Windscreen revisits those concepts by exploring the relationship between automobiles and their owners today.
When combing through neighborhoods for cars, I look first for the way light enters a car and renders color. If I find nothing inside its cabin that tells something about its owner, I move on. Above all, the car needs to be drivable or just recently taken off the road. If a car sits for too long uninhabited, it loses something. The composite of this automotive space reflects who we are, where we come from, and possibly where we are going.
