Dream Car
A justification of why I continue to seek out and photograph the lowest hanging of fruit
I feel like when I was growing up, everyone had a dream car. As a kid, everyone was lusting after the Dodge Viper or Ford Mustangs. My friends would come to school with car magazines tucked between their math and science textbooks like they were sneaking in a Playboy. At lunch, they would gawk at Car and Driver and dream of driving right out of town and into the dream.
Our family car was a light blue Plymouth Voyager. One time, I got a Crash Test Dummy action figure and, in my rush to make it explosively dismember, launched its arm into the seat belt mechanism housing. Afterward, the seat belt would randomly lock up while we were driving. I avoided that seat whenever I could. The Plymouth Voyager was definitely not my dream car.
Actually, I’m not sure I ever had a dream car. Cars, for me, were functional. They got us to the dentist or, when we saw the glow of headlights snaking down Cave Hill Road, carried the promise of pizza delivery. They didn’t inspire longing or aspiration.
But I understand the appeal. The car as freedom. The car as potential. The car as the American Dream. A box of limitless possibility parked right in the driveway. For many, a car is a self-portrait in motion, a symbol of who they are—or who they want to be. Yet for me, cars are more compelling as artifacts than as aspirations.
Especially old cars. Modern vehicles feel engineered for impermanence—leases, upgrades, trade-ins—like disposable machines for a disposable age. But older cars endure. Their weight and materiality suggest permanence. Their longevity has transformed them into something greater than their original purpose. In a sense, they’ve become dream objects. No longer merely tools for transit, they are relics of a time when going somewhere—anywhere—was the dream itself.
Cars aren’t necessarily about freedom anymore. They’re markers of what freedom used to mean. Like synaptic shortcuts to a cultural ideal, they evoke a collective memory of endless highways and open horizons. A totem, perhaps, for mid-century American longing. The value isn’t in where the car could take you—but in the idea that it could.
Perhaps it's this escapist quality that draws me to both cars and dreams. We buy cars for the same aspirational reason we dream: to escape reality, to find our true selves, to arrive at a brighter future.
As a photographer, I’m drawn to these cars—not just for what they are, but for where they are, and what that relationship represents. A good photograph of a classic car shouldn’t focus on the car alone. It should illuminate the world around it, the time and place it inhabits. A dream car by itself is inert. It must be in dialogue with its surroundings, in a conspiracy with its space.
The cars I photograph are often abandoned, their paint fading under streetlamps or their edges softened by fog. They are relics, hovering in the liminal space between what was and what might have been. A story half-remembered. They feel less like machines and more like monuments to lost potential.
There’s an inherent nostalgia in car photography, a kind of yearning that tries to recapture the height of car culture, when the American Dream felt tangible and cars were its chrome-plated heralds. Most modern images of classic cars seem to chase an ideal, attempting to shortcut their way back to the glossy optimism of the mid-20th century. But I find the more compelling story lies in what’s left behind—in the aftermath of the dream.
My dream car is probably a train, actually.
Elsewhere
Everyone’s trying out Bluesky, or at least it feels that way. If you’re thinking of making the leap, here are a few Starter Packs to get you off on the right foot, photographically speaking:
Wesley Verhoeve made a fine list of photographers with YouTube channels, podcasts, and newsletters.
Jimmy Mortram has a great list of photojournalists, photographers, and curators.
Photo Books of Note
One Sun, One Shadow by Shane Lavalette. This is a languid, hazy, masterful rumination on the American South.
I Am the Only Woman There by Bertien van Manen. Pre-order this work documenting female labor migrants and the wives of labor migrants by the masterful Dutch documentary photographer who passed away earlier this year.
I am much older than you so I got my drivers license in 1974. Cars of that era were not built to last. Transmissions lasted 20k-30k miles if you were lucky. By 60k miles, most cars were falling apart. 100k miles on a car was rare. By then the upholstery was splitting. Door handles, window cranks, and lock buttons, were cracked or missing. The cars handled lousy, were heavy, used a ton of gas, and were dangerous. I had about a dozen of my classmates die in car accidents before they reached 20 (of course the drinkng age was 18 back then.) The best thing that came about from the oil crisis in 1970s is that Americans found out about the superiority of Japanese cars.
I think it’s interesting that in many of photos from the 70s and 80s, the cars add such atmosphere and put a timestamp on the scene though, at the time, photographers like Joel Meyerowitz and Stephen Shore we’re just photographing the Kia Sorrentos and Honda CRV‘s of their day. Now photographers (myself included) are still drawn to those some era cars. Those cars were new in the 70s, which would be the equivalent of those photographers shooting Model As and Packards.