OUT AND ABOUT

By MICHAEL PERKINS

PHOTOGRAPHS ARE NOT MERELY RECORDS OF WHAT THINGS LOOKED LIKE: they are also echo chambers of who we were, what we incorporated into our lives, what we aspired to.  The daily objects, the cultural “set design” of our lives sometimes survives outside their original era of dominance, and thus become unanchored, strange, lacking a backstory. Look at that thing. Imagine having one of those. What were they even for? Who were the people who used them? How do ya work it?

Among many other things that were designed to define their owners, or at least distinguish them from each other, automobiles may rank as some of the most personal. Their power, as symbols of having “made it” in some material measure, seems to have peaked between the 1920’s, when owning one first became an attainable dream for the many, and the 1970’s, when safety and economy concerns began to change the very idea of auto design, making more and more of them matter less and less. And somewhere, in that wondrous stretch of dream farming, came this car.

This 1949 Packard Series 23 Club Sedan seems to us more than merely a means to get from point “A” to point “B”: it’s also about the pleasure, the luxury of getting there. It’s a machine that pre-dates mechanized car washes, with small armies of Dads and apprentices caressing its every curve with chamois and newspaper after hosing it off in the driveway on a Saturday, the object being to ready it for dates on Saturday nights and family drives, to nowhere in particular, on Sundays, as if the very act of sitting in the thing were a destination all its own. It’s thick, heavy….substantial. Its interior appointments go beyond upholstery, resembling the coachwork of the recently-bygone age of horse-drawn elegance. Its engine, blissfully heedless of the environment, is a small factory of roaring power, a beast barely contained within a heaving heart of sheet metal and chrome. It’s grand and noisy and massive and garish and hideously unsafe and, now untethered from our everyday experience, something of a dream machine.

How could you see this thing in someone’s driveway, as I recently did, and not stop, not try to tell its story, not attempt to convey its force? Photographs are never, ever mere records. When we make an effort to craft them, they are portals, sneak peeks into the used-to-be’s that are on the way to becoming the never-was’es, and curating that process is a privilege.