The covered car has been a dark icon for me since I started taking photographs over 30 years ago. Perhaps it was the impression made by one of the images in Robert Frank’s seminal photo essay, The Americans.

In “Covered Car, Long Beach, CA, 1956”, he displays an undetermined vehicle, draped in a white, store-bought cover, regally flanked by twin palm trees, lit by the fading sun, like a shroud containing the American dream.



Collecting images of covered cars seems never-ending, though not without reward. I find the cars never fail to surprise me, appearing when least expected and often when I’m without a camera. One of the pleasures of being a obsessive-compulsive is trying not to let a car get away, spotting a prime specimen, and waiting for it to show itself in glorious light and isolation, to convey a brooding presence behind the familiar.



Many people (mainly men) want to know the make of the car hidden. I never say. In fact, I never look.

I can probably guess about half of the models, (there is even one photograph of a covered pile of bricks pretending to be a van!) but I think it is better not to know. The mystery of the unwrapped gift.



The real question, for me, is why are the cars covered?

Protection from the elements, or safety from predators?



These funereal objects set in aspic represent, for me, both an emblem of our love affair with the motorcar and a symbolic presager of a time when we will look back and wonder at the level of our total dependancy.