Celebrating a pedestrian’s vision of vintage cars

When I was growing up my family did not have a car. We used public transit. Sometimes we used taxis. Mostly, we walked. We walked a lot. When you walk a lot, you see many things you miss when you are in an automobile.

After I grew up, I continued to walk. I walked and I looked. I looked up at the tops of buildings. I looked in store windows and I looked at closed doors. I looked down at sewer grates, and at weeds growing out of cracks in the pavement. Wherever I looked on my walks, I saw amazing things. I saw the whole world in details, and in abstractions.

Soon I could not walk without a camera. I looked, I saw, and I took photos. I’ve been taking photos of details and abstractions for many years now. “Auto Parts” presents some of my photos of cars – the way I, a walker and a non-driver, see them.

Preview 40 photos of vintage Hood Ornaments in this keepsake, print-on-demand photo art portfolio. Available through MagCloud – $12 a copy includes free digital version!

Although I don’t drive, and view modern cars strictly as utilitarian modes of transportation, I delight in visiting classic car shows and car museums.

Camera in hand, I spend hours strolling amidst the stunning beauties of a bygone era, stopping frequently to capture the elegant detailing and design of these vintage cars.

Hood ornaments – those stylish embellishments that had largely disappeared from cars in the 1960s – enchant me. I love seeing the flights of fancy in the sculptural winged goddesses and flying figures that adorned the earliest automobiles, most often on radiator caps, and the futuristic vision in the sleekly contoured animals and airplanes that graced the hoods of cars in the thirties, forties and fifties.

Hood Ornaments presents some of my favourite photos of hood ornaments for your enjoyment.

Preview 40 more photos of vintage Hood Ornaments in this keepsake, print-on-demand photo art portfolio. Available through MagCloud – $12 a copy includes free digital version!

Hood Ornaments 2 highlights more of my photographs of automobile hood and fender ornaments. I made them over the past dozen years while visiting classic car shows and car museums in Canada and the United States.

I find the streamlined rockets and airplanes, along with some more abstract sculptures, to be delightful flights of fancy. Mostly from the nineteen fifties, they reflect speed, and the bold confidence of the jet age.