Gordon Osmundson Photographs'

VINTAGE CARS & TRUCKS

In the Grain Elevator Series the theme of abstraction emerged in my work. At Jamestown I concentrated on doing abstract studies, but when I was done a sense of time had emerged as an important theme. Strangely, it was always there in my photography, I just hadn't seen it as a theme. The steam locomotives are historic artifacts, the grain elevators had a sense of timelessness, but now I began to see that a patina of age and use did more than add character to the image. It gave a sense of history.

This project takes this theme even further, the past being divided into model years. As a baby boomer, I find these vehicles and their styling largely unknown and yet they seem familiar. I can imagine myself driving them. I can also imagine others driving them in times past, of their styling being the latest and most fashionable thing, of their being a part of the texture of lives lived not so very long ago, but now past.

There is a strange way in which a working machine can bring the past back to life. It speaks to us of past technology and the way it was applied to create a complete solution to a given problem, and how it became something that we could use, enjoy and in which people took pride. Unlike vintage clothing or architecture, an historic machine at work is reliving its historic use, it is not being recycled into an adaptive reuse. But perhaps more importantly, machines, like living things, are self animating, in there own way they have personalities, turn them on and they come to life. Fire up an old machine and its past comes to life with it. Look at the image on the left, Dash - 49 Olds' and imagine yourself settling behind that steering wheel and motoring off into 1949.

The late 30's to the early 60's was a period of great changes in automotive design. Cars evolved from boxy upright affairs with separate fenders and headlights into the fat, rounded, aerodynamically styled designs of the forties noteworthy for their sensuously rounded shapes and heavy chrome trim. These designs gave way to the low squared off but flamboyant styles of the late fifties and beyond.

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BMW

Buick

Cadillac

Chevrolet

Chrysler

DeSoto

Dodge

Ford

Hupmobile

Hudson

Jaguar

LaSalle

Lincoln

Oldsmobile

Packard

Plymonth

Triumph

Aircraft were used as styling inspirations. The first fins, on a Cadillac, were styled after a WWII fighter plane, the twin boom Lockheed P-38 Lighting. Rockets and jet aircraft appeared as hood ornaments. Propeller spinners showed up on grills and bumpers. Large round taillights were faired into the rear fenders as though they were jet exhausts.

General Motors was the style leader throughout this period and those styles came from its department of Art and Colour under the direction of Harley Earl. Mr. Earl, as he was known, worked for designs that were ever lower and longer. He believed that the styling of a car should keep you entertained as you traveled around it. These philosophies served GM well for many years as they led to ever more opulent designs. But there eventually came to be a limit to this as cars came to be rolling juke boxes festooned with chrome. The height (or perhaps low point) of this trend was the 1959 Cadillac. After this car a new design paradigm was needed. It came from Chrysler with a new sleek and simplified look with lines that flowed the length of the car. Mr. Earl saw the hand writing on the wall and went into retirement.

There are few of these cars on the road today. Most are in the hands of collectors or rusting away in a field some place. But in their time, the aircraft and rocket styling, the general flamboyance, spoke of a time of hopefulness and progress, of a belief in science, technology and the future.

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