A Ford

This is a hard one. The content is, doubly, against my preferences.

First, I don't really take photographs as documentation. I appreciate that people do, and I really like the work. But my preference is always to try to make paintings — in the lazy way where I don't have to paint them. I'm looking for scenes in the world that I can flatten into a painting.

That said, I do like that people do documentary photography. I even like that I can go into Google Street View and go back ten or fifteen years and see what the world looked like. An old car is something you'd maybe intuitively want to document, because there are going to be fewer and fewer of them as we move forward. Again, it's just not my thing.

Second, I don't give a damn about cars. I don't even know what kind of car this is. I know it's a Ford. Beyond that, nothing. I just happened to have a camera, and I was looking for things to flatten in the world. I saw these old cars in a parking lot in Pasadena, in front of buildings that felt from the same era as the cars. The whole scene felt period-correct. I decided to take a picture. It turned out that I actually like it.

Right place, right time.