From the author:
By 1994 my 17-year classic car restoration and art car career had come to a temporary halt. I moved to New Mexico in 1995 where I had planned to continue my work and where the story behind these images begins.
The unusual beauty and drama of Norther New Mexico's high desert landscape unfolded before me capturing my imagination. I could spend days driving the empty roads and highways without a focus or a destination, absently traveling through the countryside enjoying the spectacular scenery, collecting rocks, visiting remote villages at the end of rutted dirt roads, seduced by the glorious desert environment that surrounded me.
Suddenly, abandoned classic cars started popping into view. They called to me, it seemed. There they were, incongruously lying in remote and unlikely locations, piercing the unspoiled landscape with their comatose presence. No roads seemed to take them there. Somehow the fields, arroyos, rivers, ravines and ranchlands had become their graves.
Never without my camera, I documented many of these encounters. Some of the cars had rested undisturbed for decades, most were iconic 1950s classic machines preserved by the dry desert climate, now being slowly swallowed by the natural world that surrounded, entangled and grew within them.
To encounter these haphazardly tossed cars in this pristine desert landscape was a startling vision.
To view these former objects of glamour and desire, at one time treasured and pampered by their owners, and whose curving, strong and smooth sensual bodies I had lovingly restored, sanded, painted, rubbed and polished for hours, days and weeks on end, existing as discarded broken toys trashing the fragile desert landscape foretold the end of my career with cars.
It was a start awakening to the impact of the toxic chemicals and fumes I had brought into my life, and to the implications of these material byproducts of human and industrial consumption on our environment. I know then that my career with cars had ended.
Hardcover, 56 pages.
