Remember driving home in your new automobile, enjoying that “new car smell?” Remember driving to work and showing it to your co-workers and taking your friends for a ride? Remember Saturday night dates, driving to the grocers and taking vacations? Remember returning to the parking lot and seeing your first door ding after you just washed and waxed it? Those were the days.

The need for transportation, along with the automobile, produced decades of struggles between needs versus wants and status versus basic transportation; creating one of the greatest dilemmas of our culture. When one finds acres of junked vehicles wasting away their last days of existence, we have to ponder the costs; car payments with interest, gas and oil, insurance, upkeep and a myriad of other expenses. Were wise decisions made? Or were they the result of a lemming-like rush to follow the siren song of advertising and sales presentations satisfying an unknown inner urge? We may never know the answer.

Missing from all the metal, plastic, cloth, rubber and other materials is the record of another cost, that of the deaths that may have occurred when these vehicles were driven on our highways. In recent years that number amounted to over 40,000 people per year plus countless other injuries.

And yet, seeing all these shapes, colors, textures, broken windshields and rusted parts and surfaces, a photographer can’t help but feel the opportunity for creative expression. When the light is just right on a partly cloudy day, this residue of times past provides an infinite number of combinations for photographic representation. Perhaps it is the last hurrah of these vehicles, as they reach the pinnacle of their existence in the form of artistic imagery.

I hope you enjoy these images. (Please click image above to see the gallery.)