On Cars by Issy Wood (from her blog Committed to the Dish)
I suspect anybody who bore witness to their father’s midlife crisis would struggle to see the seductive draw of cars to men, men to cars. If said crisis coincides with a divorce, all the better. Seeing a late voyage into bachelorhood play out will often, if not always, involve a Nice Car
Perhaps a convertible, perhaps something overpriced - the latter being a financially self-destructive dance on the grave of settlements and child support. Less an attempt to attract women, more a kind of horcrux for heartbroken machismo. The nice car is the anti-family, because the nice car might only have two seats. The nice car says “I cant collect the kids unless they’re happy contorting themselves and their school bags to fit in the trunk like hostages”. This isn’t a coincidence
Really Nice cars are Mayfair’s municipal furniture - they hum idly on the edges of Dover street, or growl along whichever 20 yard gaps in traffic are possible at noon on Berkeley square (very few)
The noise a really nice car makes is the sound its driver’s testosterone wishes it could make. Roland Barthes stated 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”
Very little has changed since 1957 - magical objects are still the panacea for those who feel vulnerable in the face of reality. What could protect or distract from one’s insecurities than a really nice car’s “smooth as cake-icing” shell? A vestibule for the fearful-flaneur, a literal vehicle for that niggling sense of redundancy?
I use redundancy in an existential sense (the driver?) but also in a practical one: London’s congestion and illogically gridless geography make for snail-pace crawling and accidental wrong turns which retroactively and remotely embarrass the whatever-thousand horsepower of a really nice car. I don’t think Porsche or Lamborghini ever wanted their creations to max out at the speed of a tractor. Having said this, the slow-motion drive by, a stalwart of rap videos and cinematic billboard ads, is your best shot at attracting the envied gaze of onlookers your ego has needed for however many years mediation dragged on.
I’m backtracking - my first thoughts about really nice cars came at a fraudulently millennial moment: delving into Joan Rivers’ Getty Image archive. Her with her baby daughter, her and her now-dead husband, her stepping onto a red carpet with tight curls and an even tighter facelift from the dark leather interior of a Rolls Royce. Imagine the retinal contrast of a dark vehicle followed by a paparazzi assault - she deals with it beautifully, as though all she’s ever wanted is to have her pupils dilate at dangerous speed
In Los Angeles, one long exercise in parallel parking, any prior awareness of cars and their interiors turn from ergonomic hold-music to The beginnings of taste and opinion
What starts as practicality turns into a kind of aromatic connoisseurship: synthetic vs real leather, stale tobacco vs rushed attempts to mask stale tobacco, your marijuana vs a fellow freeway user’s marijuana. An inner foley archive grows as passenger door slams reveal their own unique melodies, seat belt clicks have syllables, talk radio falls prey to a people carrier’s unique acoustics, a window wound down half an inch treads the line between soothing white noise and unbearable breathiness if given a full inch
As a passenger keen to nudge a Lyft rating upwards, maintaining passionate dialogue which is both louder than the freeway and directed straight into the driver’s right ear from behind becomes necessity. Topics fit for the car interior: funk music, slavery, government, set design, veganism, heritage, second hand books, your daughter’s Libra traits, ceviche, your daughter’s charcoal sketches, travel sickness, multiple sclerosis, mayonnaise, grief
A little like porn, there exist two kinds of car interior online : the high octane professionalised ones and the equivalents of a home video
The former is there to sell a kind of masculine prison / haven, or an upholstery service so fantastic it’s almost existential. They’ve taken Roland Barthes’ idea of smoothness and run with it. Go close enough to these images and you start to suspect any reality outside of horsepower and gear changes to be conspiracy
Even the artificial countryside / city lights / proverbial open road they’ve squeezed to fit the passenger windows like a parabolic screensaver seems honest about being a total ruse. What good is sunlight when you’ve got an LED constellation at your fingertips? the photo asks
The characteristic most unique in these sales-driven interiors is the angle from which the photo is taken - often just below the passenger seat, where their shin ought to be, or from where the wing mirror meets the car body. For an image relying so heavily on human impulse to function, these angles are some of the least human imaginable
To see the car interior in this way, you would either need to be taken hostage and hidden under the airbags (and presumably under duress) or have just been hit by the car itself, and plastered across the windscreen. Even then, the panoramic, all-seeing, scope of the picture make it difficult even for 20/20 vision to compete. I’m reminded of apartment ads on lettings webpages where the property is shot to look more spacious and all-encompassing than the floor plan states. Side note: Occasionally they write specious rather than spacious, confirming that even real estate brokers aren’t immune to Freudian slips
The latter car interior, the amateur analogue of a home video, is found almost exclusively on motoring forums - the glove compartment of the internet. Usernames have me taking adages like “petrolhead” too literally and feeling concerned
Rather than to sell, though this could be the case on a second-hand site, this photo’s grand motive is to brag, to exalt. The photos are barely idol-worthy - mostly aggressive Olympus Coolpix flashes or blurred or washed out crime-scene style evidence potentially taken in a semi-crouch position with the kind of concentration forcing your tongue out
We come full circle here, to the divorced dad / paranoid bachelor stereotype, and realise stereotypes aren’t created in vacuums. New upholstery, restoration, hubcaps, hood ornaments, requests for jealousy disguised as pragmatic questions
Mechaphilia (sexual or romantic Love of automobiles, helicopters, planes) previously undisclosed before a documentary about ten years ago, showed candid footage of a lonely man both sneaking out into the night to fuck the tailpipe of a vintage VW and crying real grief-stricken tears over a beloved helicopter crashing
Like all pathologies and temperaments, love of automobiles is a sliding scale. This was (one can only hope) the cul de sac of car-love extremity
However you’ll find motor vehicles with the pronoun “she” attached to them across the board. Romanticism and romance are different, but these amateur car interior photos suggest that it isn’t out of the question for somebody to love their car more than their spouse, to feel safer amongst the gears and leather than in their own home, or to express more pride in a new paint job than in their own kids’ sporting accolades
It’s fun to try on testosterone, Preciado-style, rub up against all forms of petrolhead pride, of advertised longing, illusions of affluence or safety, of celebrity indifference, of travelling intimacy or of simply wanting to Go Really Fast without a license to do so
Catalogue Notes
Rooted in themes of gender, psychology, design, and consumerism, Wood's car interiors are deceptively simple yet layered with complexity. In 2019, she explained to Sarah McCrory, "I think of the cars as quite a masculine environment. The car advertising images I work from, and the real cars I photograph all seem to be for or driven by men. The car is an escape for a man, a way to experience freedom—or at least that's how advertising sells it: a way to get away from the wife and kids, just you and the open road, a sort of urban cowboy. It's fun to try that on for size, to see what it would be like to be a man for whom this is a desirable object."
Wood's subjects are culled from contemporary ephemera like advertisements, auction house catalogues, and personal snapshots. They feature car interiors, leather jackets, and pop icons. Painted on velvet or discarded clothing, Wood's works explore society's relationship with commodities. Her car interiors suggest a pathological or even medical examination, as if attempting to exorcise the seductive appeal of the ordinary. This process has been described as "perverted realism," where Wood's muted palette and disquieting perspectives enhance the unsettling qualities of the compositions.
In her blog Commit to the Dish, Wood has further examined the relationship between car and consumer. In her piece "On Cars," she writes: "I suspect anybody who bore witness to their father's midlife crisis would struggle to see the seductive draw of cars to men, men to cars. If said crisis coincides with a divorce, all the better. Seeing a late voyage into bachelorhood play out will often, if not always, involve a Nice Car."
Further exploring the psychology behind the car interiors in advertisements, Wood observes: "The characteristic most unique in these sales-driven interiors is the angle from which the photo is taken—often just below the passenger seat, where their shin ought to be, or from where the wing mirror meets the car body. For an image relying so heavily on human impulse to function, these angles are some of the least human imaginable.… To see the car interior in this way, you would either need to be taken hostage and hidden under the airbags (and presumably under duress) or have just been hit by the car itself, and plastered across the windscreen. Even then, the panoramic, all-seeing scope of the picture makes it difficult even for 20/20 vision to compete…. Romanticism and romance are different, but these amateur car interior photos suggest that it isn't out of the question for somebody to love their car more than their spouse, to feel safer amongst the gears and leather than in their own home, or to express more pride in a new paint job than in their own kids' sporting accolades."
Wood's work with car interiors is not merely about cars themselves, but an exploration of masculine freedom, psychological space, and the uneasy relationships we form with objects, particularly when they are sold as symbols of identity.
