Customer Reviews

The Car and the Camera: The Detroit School of Automotive Photography

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To my mind, old-school car photography was great in its day, and the guys who cranked it out undoubtedly worked hard and tried everything they could think of, but today it's pretty bland stuff when compared to the good natural sharp look often seen today.

The book was not a loss at all, though, as the front-matter history lesson is most interesting. And there is one photo in this book that flat knocked me over. It is the very essence of photography. It's plate 50 on page 87, illustrating a 1941 Buick Special (Model 465), photographed in 1993 by a Mr Steve Cooper.

The setting is at night or maybe early morning, the background is foggy, with WWII bombers getting ready to roll, everything misty and dim, and in the middle of this scene is a glistening tack-sharp Buick. Absolutely great and well worth the price of the book.

Before digital cameras, Photoshop, 3D CGI cars, and dying American car companies, there was a time when a very select group of Detroit car studios had real high-paid technical photo experts who were masters at the art of commercial car film photography. They understood how to make cars longer, or more sqat and aggressive using lenses or lumber or other tricks of the trade. They could create almost any indoor or outdoor scene within a studio shaped like the inside of an eggshell. They would get well-paid trips to far-away location shoots with lots of eating and drinking at the end of every long day behind the big 8x10 view cameras. This book celebrates some of these titans of this by-gone era of Detroit car shooting.

I have had the honor to work with a few of these great old-time car shooters, and then to compare them to the newer and younger freelance digital guys who the agencies bring in from outside of Detroit at a fraction of the price, and the sad reality is that there is a difference. Once the old guys go that will be the end of The Detroit School of Automotive Photography. There is no longer a system where first you assist an old-time car shooter for 5-10 years, then you get your own name in the game with your own Detroit studio. Also, there is no longer much real loyalty in the car photography business from the ad agencies and car companies within Detroit. Today it is all about some new look or effect that is created in the computer by a digital artist at the lowest possible price without doing real justice to the "product presentation" (and the car companies wonder why their sales are down...). With HDR, CGI, and Photoshop today's car shooter is little more than the "source file collector". Of course, there are still exceptions to the new trend here and there when some new art buyer learns that you can actually get a lot of cool stuff done, and present the car in a really great way (with a lot more creative control) by actually using a trained Detroit car shooter spending 6-8 hours on ONE photo in a car studio as compared to sending out a photo for 10-20 hours of rendering and then retouching or compositing many images into one.

The only thing I wish was better about this book is if it was covered even more of the Detroit car photo history, and then took things into the 2000's.