Officially, everything is fine-tuned: A broken, no longer ready to drive or just old car is logged off, fed to the raw material recovery and ends up in the scrap press. Further details are regulated by the end-of-life vehicle ordinance. Often it is quite different. Car wrecks are simply pushed into the forest, left to their own devices somewhere at the end of a large property, parked in the corner of a barn or parked in the garage. Because the owner does not have the heart to squeeze the old cart into a compact cube. Or because he plans to get the box started again, to restore it, possibly to sell it profitably. Many plans, many projects, many conjunctives.
The rusty charm and the morbid magic that results when these projects are not implemented, have inspired the photographers Theodor Barth and Uwe Sülflohn to a large-scale book project. For three years, the two roamed the whole of Europe to find forgotten and abandoned car makers. Like detectives, they followed vague clues, obscure directions, half-baked rumors - and in the end often faced cars that had not moved for a long time, but all the more moving motives.
Parking of broken dreams
"This is not an autobook, but a picture book," writes Sülflohn in the foreword to the volume through which one leafs through ever-widening eyes. Incredibly, what treasures on any run-down estate spoil, one thinks. You just have to clean up this automobile treasure once, repair some trifles and gasoline ...
That's exactly how the owners of the cars had thought. The facts have been recorded by Barth and Sülflohn. Greatly photographed, described witty, but almost always irrevocably: These cars will never drive again.
Night shift between bumps and birches
Barth and Sülflohn photographed almost exclusively at night, sometimes at dusk and once during the day. An owner wanted to see a football game on television from 7.30 pm and insisted that the photographers would then have to be from the court. The result was a picture of a gloomy hall full of VW Beetle, an automobile burial chamber, into which no sunlight penetrated for a long time.
The book seduces to amazement and discovery. And because one learns in the few texts surprisingly much of the work of the photographer - from encounters with French gendarmes as well as dog owners in fine rib undershirts - you accompany them as a reader, so to speak, in the motive hunt. It's great fun, no matter if you're more interested in the cars, the pictures or the secrets that are hidden in them.