I've spent some more time this week editing the photographs I took during the summer at Old Car City in Georgia, a place well worth the 35 mosquito bites that were its downside.
This is a collection of colour edits for you - if you'd like to check out some black and white shots, have a look at my previous post from Old Car City.
While we were at this amazing vintage car graveyard, we met a very nice reporter from The Associated Press, and he interviewed me about my thoughts on the location. I'm sorry to say that under such pressure all articulate thought deserted me and I said, "I love old American cars. There are many more cars than I imagined. I love it". This deeply perceptive comment is now reported verbatim all over the internet, since he wrote a very interesting article with great photographs, and lots of news outlets have used it. Excellent.
One of the coolest places I visited during my summer break was Old Car City in White, Georgia. It was very much worth braving my 35 mosquito bites and temperatures far from comfortable for a person from Belfast in order to see the 4,400 gently decaying vintage American cars on the site.
Old Car City is set at the edge of a forest, and one of the most appealing things for me was the way the plants and the cars seemed to have grown and aged together to create such a magical environment. I sometimes identify the main themes in my work as beauty, heritage and decay, and as I've started editing my hundreds of shots from this trip it strikes me how very much all of these interests are being fulfilled here.
I spent a happy couple of hours with my camera at the Ulster Transport Museum today. I'm not interested in trains in a trainspotterish type of way (obviously I am way too cool), but I do love old trains in a sculptural, metalwork, design-ish sort of a way. Again, they tick my boxes of heritage, beauty and decay.
One of my great-grandfathers worked for the Midland Railway in the early years of the twentieth century. His role was looking after the horses in the railway yards, but I like to think that he might sometimes have climbed up into a train like one of these and admired the beauty of the brass work - and the hammer marks which make it human - just as I did today.
