The invisible third party
04/16/2022
Occasionally, when rummaging through the archives, you come across old advertising photographs for cars and wonder what message they were once intended to convey. In this Renault motif from 1956, too, everything seems quite normal at first: two young women in bathing suits and the car to be advertised behind them on the beach create a motif full of summery lightness that makes you want to take your next Mediterranean vacation in the Dauphine.
Until you spot the guy with the Rolleiflex and the sly look on his face under the parasol and ask yourself: what's he doing here? Why isn't he looking through the viewfinder? Do the two ladies even know he's sitting there? His posture doesn't look like that of a cheerful vacation snapshot photographer. It looks much more like he's trying to hide the camera as best he can. And suddenly the movie in his head changes. Instead of a shallow comedy, it's now a psychological thriller. Perhaps the limousine in "bleu méditerranée" also belongs to the cameraman and the girls arrived on foot long beforehand. At any rate, it still seems as if they haven't noticed their observer.
As strange as the motif may seem, the advertising photographer must have had something in mind. Even if it was just the absurdly specific desire to make the editor of a Zurich classic car magazine wonder exactly 66 years later.
