"CARS" + Stephen Bayley + Tif Hunter

This is not a book about compression ratios – this is a book about freedom, style, sex, power, motion, color, and design. CARS is about culture and, in many ways, a beautiful and timely swansong to the heyday of an industry that is fast running out of fuel.

The car is the most evocative of contemporary objects, and alongside movies and rock and roll, is one of the most distinctive artistic expressions of the modern era, exposing layers of meaning.

The subtitle of CARS borrows from Tom Wolfe’s The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby . “Cars mean more to these kids than architecture did in Europe’s great formal century, say, 1750 to 1850,” wrote Wolfe. “They are freedom, style, sex, power, motion, colour – everything is right there.”

Stephen Bayley, award-winning British car journalist, design authority, and self-proclaimed culture guru presents a spectacular, chronological study of achievement in car design — from the 1908 Ford Model T to the 1961 Jaguar E-Type to the 2003 BMW 5 Series. Each car has a story and each makes a statement as to the national character of its country of origin; American flair, German technical supremacy, French chic, English antiquarianism, Japanese ingenuity, Swedish responsibility, and Italian sculpture.

With wit and humour and a keen sense of culture and history, Bayley marvels at the inventiveness of car designers and heralds the power of cars to represent and influence the culture, dreams, and collective spirit of the times.

The 86 cars he has chosen are commercial designs produced for the driving public and were not rarities or limited productions at the time they appeared on the market. Each car did, however, make a significant contribution to car design and raised the bar.

400 stunningly glamorous black-and-white toned photographs by Tif Hunter highlight form, shape and detail, both body and interior – every curve, nuance, and iconic emblem.

Bayley wanted the cars to be treated as architecture and to be photographed in a uniform way, as if they were buildings with an elevation and details.

Photographer Tif Hunter built a travelling studio to create the effect of an "infinity box", a white space without visual reference. The extraordinary, almost three-dimensional lustre was painstakingly achieved by using a color process printed in monochrome. All the cars were shot throughout England; with the exception of the BMW 328, which was photographed at BMW’s Museum in Munich.

via: http://www.carbodydesign.com/archive/2009/12/cars-by-stephen-bayley/

Cars: Freedom, Style, Sex, Power, Motion, Colour, Everything
by Stephen Bayley
Conran Octopus, 2009
384 pages, 400 monochrome photographs
ISBN: 978 184 0915044