Cars in the Wild:
San Francisco, Volume 1

A Portrait of a City Told Through Cars

From the book Backstory:

This book is over 20 years in the making. It began in 2000 when I moved into my uncle’s rent-controlled apartment on 7th Street in the East Village, Manhattan. Like most New Yorkers, I walked everywhere in the city and whenever I came across an old car I snapped a photo.

Back then I carried a 2-megapixel (!) Canon Powershot ELPH S200. Looking back at my low resolution images, I wish I had shot with film. Regardless, the image quality was more than sufficient for the online ‘exhibit’ I posted to the website  you're on right now — thecombustionchamber.com — in 2003. It featured about three dozen photos of cars and their logos. It wasn’t very different from this book.

I continued snapping shots through the years. After the Canon Powershot I upgraded to a Canon Rebel (dSLR). Then in 2008 I bought the first generation iPhone. Each year the cameras on iPhones got better and the Rebel got less use until I eventually retired it and shot everything with my little pocket computer.

Instagram launched in 2010 and I created anaccount under the username @combustionchamber and started regularly posting cars along with anything else I found interesting.

It wasn’t until late 2015 that I decided to get focused and exclusively post photos of cars (you’ll occasionally find a stray motorcycle in there). I also stopped using Instagram’s canned filters and started manually correcting images. I began to pay more attention to how I framed shots and the angles I was shooting from. I started dropping to one knee when I took profile shots of cars. This might not sound like a big deal, but once I started doing it, it just looked wrong if I didn’t.

In the spring of 2018 I looked at my Instagram feed and thought to myself, “Where is this going? What’s my goal?” A physical book seemed like the next logical step.