The automobile era: 1956-2009?
Andrew Bush's photographs of ordinary people driving, on view in his book "Drive" as well as two recent shows in New York, convey the intimate side of the automobile era, and they carry a fresh poignancy, too, given the recent near-collapse of the American car industry.
Unlike much car photography, Bush's images aren't about the machines, as Adam Harrison Levy, a writer and documentary filmmaker, points out in a fine essay posted at Design Observer. You won't find fetishism of the Mustang, Corvette, or various other exemplars of Detroit engineering and design. (Though check out this dude, who seems to have driven straight out of a mid-'70s magazine ad for a Camaro.) Rather, the photographs are about the relationship between humans and their vehicles. "It's been over one hundred years since the combustion engine was first invented," Levy writes, "and we now eat, drink, talk and die in our cars as naturally as we do in our domestic spaces." Bush's photos, it's worth noting, predate the cell phone, which wedged its way awkwardly between humankind and car, changing the dynamic.
Levy contrasts the people on view in Bush's work with the newspaper-reading subway commuters from the 1930s and '40s whom Walker Evans captured in his book "Many are Called":
The subjects of Andrew Bush's photographs … seem freer and more expressive but they are also appear more alone and anxious. They have gained their autonomy but at what price?
The classic era of the American automobile could be said to begin in 1956, with the birth of the interstate highway system. Could 2009 mark the terminus? And, a decade from now, will photographs of commuters in their Insights and Priuses carry the cultural punch that Bush's images do?
