Gaywheels

My “Driven” series is essentially about entropy; it’s the automotive equivalent of “ruin porn”. I’m attracted to the textures of old, beat up cars, the weeds growing up and around the abandoned vehicles, and the left-behind, lonely nature of the cars — once driven and beloved — left to the elements by their owners. [...]

On Tuesday night, the auto industry made quite a splash at the 2012 GLAAD Amplifier Awards. [...]

The “Lebanon Valley” series is one of my more personal series because it involves family and memory. When I was a kid, my sister and I were occasionally allowed to go with my cousins and uncles to the races there. One uncle had started racing cars at 16, and worked on a pit crew for a friend’s car. My first camera was a Kodak Instamatic, and I would sit in the stands with my father watching the cars and carefully frame my photos, believing in my naive eight-year-old-heart that my picture was special and it would look like a pro shot of a racing car, not a crappy snapshot with the chain link fence between me and the blurry car. [...]

I’d flown to Detroit to experience the Woodward Dream Cruise, an enormous, cult-ish meeting of extremely enthusiastic vintage car owners and their rides that takes place for two days each summer on the first paved road in America. I saw someone driving around with two skeletons in the backseat of their late-80s Oldsmobile Cutlass Convertible. It’s all a bit strange. [...]

Photographer Megan Green is known for her spectacular shots of cars and car culture. Recently, Megan sent Gaywheels three sets of her work, which we’ll roll out over the next few Fridays. Here’s a series she calls “Retro”, along with a note from the artist. [...]

Most people would probably choose to buy a new car every three years or so if they could afford it, but some of us have an appreciation for older cars — much older cars. While I love, love, love them, I know next to nothing about restoration or upkeep, so I always admire them from one lane over or across the street. But it wasn’t always this way. In fact, I used to ride in a lot of older, beautiful cars, but I was much too young to appreciate them at the time. [...]