IT’S BEEN A WHILE SINCE I WAS ABLE TO SHOOT the Auto Show and Motorama in the same winter. Motorama was the last public event I attended before lockdowns, and it returned a year before the Auto Show did, though I was out of town for last year’s Motorama. Which makes this year a treat – two car shows barely a month apart, though they’re very different animals: one made by the auto business, the other by gearheads. I’ll let you guess which one is just that much more creatively inspiring for me.
I came off this year’s Auto Show on a creative buzz, having pushed my car photography further out than I’d ever managed before.
Let’s just say that everything I wrote about shooting the Auto Show on this blog a couple of weeks ago applies twice as much with these photos.
The worst thing about Motorama is that I don’t have the space or leisure to shoot it like I do on Media Day at the Auto Show; I go there like any other paying customer, and have to work around the weekend crowds.
The best thing about Motorama, however, is that every car on display is someone’s labour of love, a project that could never return the investment in time and money that’s been put into it.
So in addition to drawing from a century of automotive design, every vehicle on the floor at the International Centre is imbued with passion and personality.
Which means that the work I do at Motorama is just a little more like portrait photography than still-life work, if that doesn’t sound too pretentious.
While I brought a whole bag of gear with me to this year’s Auto Show, I limited myself at Motorama to just one camera (my Fuji XT2) and two lenses: my East German Pentacon 50/1.8 and my Soviet-made Helios 44-2 58/2 with the reversed front element.
I’m not sure if this is fine art photography or a photo essay or my naive attempt to produce the kind of commercial car photography that I wish someone would pay me to take. I just know that it’s more fun than it should be, and that my year would be a lot drearier if I didn’t have two car shows to shoot every winter. (And if you want to check out a bunch of my auto show work, click here.)
Rick McGinnis Photographs 