As a symbol of the American dream and the associated rise of the middle class in the 20th century, the car has been omnipresent in photography since the 1950s - additionally favored by the emergence of "street photography". It serves as a means of transportation in the chaos of the busy streets as well as in the vastness and emptiness of the landscape. But it is also a place of retreat, a place of intimacy where you can withdraw from public life, where people talk, eat, sleep and make love. A home on wheels.
When Eliott Erwitt photographed cars as rolling dream structures during and after the Great Depression in America - with his own sense of humor and irony - the car was already an integral part of American culture and landscape. René Burri traveled to Brazil in the 1960s to document the construction of modern cities. One of his most famous photographs, "Men on a rooftop, Sao Paulo, 1960", is the view from a rooftop down onto four male silhouettes, the evening traffic behind and below them ... a murmur in a distant street canyon.
The Swiss photographer Simone Kappeler traveled through America in 1981, 30 years after her compatriot Robert Frank, and translated her journey photographically with a Hasselblad camera, a Polaroid camera and the cheapest toy cameras. She saw America in color, influenced by American film and photography of the 1960s. Her series "Through America" reflects her fascination with a country that has formed and developed around car culture, so very different from her small, manageable homeland.
For photography, the car is a mechanical sculpture with an external, aesthetic form that is reflected in the camera's viewfinder. But its inner life is just as important: a space in which interpersonal scenes take place as in moving theater. Ultimately, the car is part of a cinematographic visual world and as such a symbol of speed, power and freedom.
Opening hours
The Bildhalle in Kilchberg on Lake Zurich is open from Tuesday to Friday from 11:00 to 17:00 and on Saturday from 10:00 to 14:00. The "Drive-In" exhibition can be viewed from March 5, 2015.
Further information can be found on the Bildhalle website.
