Thelma and Louise's Thunderbird, Penelope Glamor's Compact Pussycat (much faster than Margot Barbie's), the machine-gunned Ford V8 in Bonnie and Clyde, Ryan Gosling's Chevy Malibu in Drive, Kitt, the Fantastic Car...
What could be the most iconic car in history? It is impossible to choose. So that? Forever and up to the present day, advertising and movies have elevated cars to the category of private spaceships, a soft paradise with buttons and little lights, for short-distance or long-distance adventure.
Freedom on four wheels at full speed, too fast too furious. Luckily, none of that happens in the Galería Alta de Andorra where some of the great photographers in history show his work. In it, the cars are beautiful, they are shiny, but at the same time they have an anecdotal point. Luxury props.
The protagonists are not so much those who drive them but those who admire them and do not own them, those who walk with their suitcases because they don't have money for a taxi. The setting is the landscape, an interstellar sky, or the frieze of the cinema that announces a Kirk Douglas film and whose letters are reflected in the jet black hood.
Perhaps the fault of everything, although it was not the first, was Lee Friedlander with his series entitled The New Cars that was commissioned in 1963 by Harper's Bazaar magazine. Was published. It was as revolutionary as it was scandalous. The owners of the great American brands in Detroit, Motor Town, dropped their cigars when they saw the result. What the f***?
No one had ever photographed the shiny new models of the year next to a carousel, hidden ingloriously behind a phone booth, in a gas station where the billboards are visible and the car seems unrecognizable, or behind the gate of a New York parking lot in the one that it is not known what the car in question is.
The star cars of the season were the Chrysler 300, the Chrysler Imperial, the Mercury Marauder and the Lincoln Continental. Friedlander was saying that the vehicle, never better said, with which the American dream was reached, was not what it seemed. The car was also a beautiful link in the assembly line on which we constantly live.
Along the walls of Galería Alta, automobiles (often cut up, almost never whole) circulate with parsimony and elegance, photographed by world photography stars such as Joel Meyerowitz, Vivian Maier, William Klein, Berenice Abbott, Ted Croner, Bruce Davidson, Louis Stettner or Marvin E. Newman.
A special mention goes to Saul Leiter, who is the star of the show –as he has been in Les Rencontres d'Arles together with that of the French-Barcelona photographer Jacques Léonard-. Leiter fills the gallery walls with a vision even more revolutionary than Friedlander's in his day.
It is no longer a matter of putting the car out of context, but of turning it into little less than an anecdote, into a perceptible but almost abstract element, the last (or almost) thing one notices when looking at the photo. The car is taken for granted, curiosity is born from the steering wheel or from the window, the exterior, the rain, the curb, an awning, take center stage from the wonderful pieces of engineering.
Leiter's cars have their personality, but with few exceptions they do not occupy the center of the image. They are heroes who have been lowered from the pedestal, gods who have been removed from the altar. In one of them, a woman who is going on a trip talks with their suitcases on the floor. The car is, at the same time, protagonist and ghostly presence
In the Galería Alta exhibition there is an image of Vivian Maier, the one of the man who carries his suitcases from nowhere, which is extraordinary, not only because of its quality but because it is in color. The photographer nanny was always tight on money and color film was quite expensive. So from here we thank you for the economic effort: photography looks great. In black and white it would have been fine, but in color, it shines like hell.
