After Impression and Restoration, I added Photoreception to the Methodology. Together with Epistemology, these finally filled my all interest about cars. Yes, photography certainly does not belong to Restoration, so does it belong to Impression? Maybe yes, but that’s an understatement to me. Among the five senses, vision, hearing, smell, taste and touch, vision is undoubtedly the most important. Everything we know about cars begins with vision. We could fall in love with a car because of a nice picture, even we may never even see it in person, but it is love at first sight. Yes, that is the beauty of photography, that it deserves its own album.
The BEST era
True commercial car photography is thought to have started in the 1960s. In the 60 years of its history, the importance of the car photography has grown stronger and stronger at first, and gradually declined after entering the 21st century. Before the Internet era, printed materials containing photos occupied a huge amount of publicity funds. With the development of the economy and the popularity of cars, car photography has reached a peak. After everything went digital, consumers had a lot more ways to learn about cars, and car photography gradually became a supplementary tool.
It’s actually hard to say whether car photography itself has become unimportant because of digital cameras and image processing technology, or whether the Internet has more to do with it. But there is no doubt that film photography and digital photography represent two eras. Film is the absolute medium before the 21st century, so talking about car photography is inseparable from film photography technology. Film, which renders images by chemical reactions, the goal of fully recreating reality never existed in its lifetime. So in essence, when we refer to movies and photos based on films, they are just an artistic expression, people have never been very strict about the authenticity of photography.
Of course, the technical principles of film make it impossible to completely reproduce the images seen by the human eye. The difference includes resolution, field of view, and more importantly, color. You could say that film is somewhat color blind relative to the human eye, or vice versa. Different films also have different Spectral sensitivity. But in this era of high-resolution digital cameras, film and television works continue to maintain an ambiguous distance from the real world. We, as viewers, have already tacitly agreed that works of art must be higher than life, because life itself is not so beautiful.
Fortunately, 140’s commercial photography began in the peak era of pure film photography, and experienced a period of aesthetic development, which left just before the arrival of the digital age. In addition to photography technology, 140 also enjoys people’s taste and pursuit of art in the 1990s. Perhaps after understanding the three genres, you will agree that 140 was in the BEST era.
The Presse genre
We should start with the most official and elementry genre, and the one we are most familiar with. The Presse genre is a genre produced by the press department of Daimler AG, planned and photographed by staff or contractors of the press department. This is the genre with the longest history in Mercedes-Benz, and 80% of the classic Mercedes photos we see are from the press department.
The most classic workstyle of this genre are cars on road or in front of landscape, sometimes dynamic, sometimes static. The press staff use closed trailers to secretly transport the unlanuched vehicles to the shooting location and make art carefully. The shooting locations could be German Autobahns, southern France, northern Spain or anywhere beautiful in that season. When necessary, the staff will also follow the prototypes fleet under test and record.
Cameras generally come in two options. When shooting static scenes, the view camera is used in order to improve the resoltion as much as possible. The advantage of this kind of camera is that it can show more details than human eyes, but it is also very heavy. So when shooting moving vehicles, a more portable 35mm film camera needs to be used. The rapid development of 35mm film camera in the 1990s made such “home device” more professional and efficient.
Wolfgang Wilhelm has been active in car photography since the 70s and is still the important photographer for Mercedes-AMG F1 team today. In December 1990, the new S-class filmed in France was discovered and leaked by “Auto Motor und Sport” car spies. The press department of Daimler AG had to release a photo of the S-class in advance. The launch of Genf 1991 is still 3 months away. This photo was taken by Wolfgang Wilhelm for the press department in Algarve, Portugal.
He used Canon EOS1 , Velvia Film , 400mm Objective F2.8. Shown above is the original scanned version of Velvia Film and the version that ended up being used as a press photo, there is actually not much difference. These photos are of high quality and definitely worth collecting.
It’s worth noting that not all of the press staff are photography maestro — they still have other works to do, some of the photos were taken by people who weren’t full-time photographers, but employees who loved photography or the arts. Press staff usually have a lot of photos to shoot in a short period of time, and because of the volume and style of these photos, they usually don’t get much artistic treatment. This means that the photos in this genre are actually very authentic, many are released without even being cropped. If absolute authenticity is what you’re after, the Presse genre has absolute historical value.
The Staud genre
The photos from the press department are efficient and practical, they are distributed to the press, and it is enough to express exactly what a new car will look like. However, more refined photos are needed for various brochures that are directly delivered to users, which is also the responsbility of marketing department. In early 1990s, brochures were still the most important way to understand a car before seeing it in person. The quality of photos can be critical to the sale.
Although Daimler AG had the in-plant studio since 1991, the size of the studio is only for close-up shots. Professional indoor photography was done by agencies, which dates back to 1983. René Staud, after famous for his photographs of the 190E 2.3-16 and the Porsche 959, founded his large studio in Leonberg in 1986 and has been processing artistic photographs for Mercedes and Porsche since then. Today, Staud Studio is still the world’s most influential automotive photography agency.
The 140, which started shooting in the fall of 1990, was naturally continued to be handed over to the trusted Staud Studio. In his 600 m² studio, Staud is particularly good at using auxiliary light sources to create various optical beauties. A studio of this size allows a telephoto lens, so “standard photos” without distortion can be taken. But yes, unlike press photos, the Staud genre are somewhat mythical, maybe a client could purchased a car because of the obession of beautiful photos, but he couldn’t reproduce these scenes with his eyes in his daily life, it’s processed art.
At the end of 1990, because the car used for shooting used different parts from the production car, Staud Studio installed the first $500,000 Kodak Premier image processing system in Europe to modify the existing photos, which pioneered the use of image technology to process car photos First of its kind. By the mid-’90s, it became common to stitch photographs using extensive imaging techniques that allowed cars to be photographed in the studio and subtly blended into outdoor backgrounds.
Interior photography is another strong point for Staud. Due to space limitations and limited illumination, there are always dark parts in interior, clever use of fill light will brighten every corner. In the 140s time, in order to shoot the interior without dead ends, the press department specially made a “convertible sculpture” with complete interior parts, several early cars were also cut as supplement. In photos they look natural, until you wonder, why the B-pillars aren’t blocking the view?
Of course, Staud also takes care of outdoor photos, these outdoor shots of cars also rely on auxiliary lights to make every corner of the cars appear brighter, which is easy to spot by photography enthusiast. Generally photos are all artistically processed as required, sometimes even complete backgrounds are replaced. Compared with the general studio, Staud is very good at image processing. But overall, everything looks photo-natural and you’ll be immersed in these masterpieces of fine art.
The Hollywood genre
Both genres above, whoever their creators are, these photos are official and they are kept in the archives of Mercedes-Benz. There is, however, another neglected school, as artistically accomplished as two genres above, but belonging to a single exclusive territory.
For a long time, car photography in the US market has been more mature and has a richer history than that in continental Europe, forming a distinctive style. It’s no surprise in the land of Hollywood that even compact cars have brochures that are highly artistic. The US was once the most important market for the S-class, and American consumers deserve to have pictures of their own taste. In order to better adapt, Mercedes-Benz North America handed over these tasks to professional advertising agencies in east coast.
Just like Europe has René Staud, when we talk about a certain impressive genre, we’re talking about a leader in the industry. Since 1980, Clint Clemens invented the patented camera mount for taking pictures of cars on the move, and has created a series of impressive photos. He is regarded as the master photographer of choice by major advertising agencies. The artistic director of the advertising company has also played a great role in the genre of the photo. In fact, because MBNA uses different agents in different years, the style of the photo can produce great changes.
The pictures of American cars have typical “golden hour” lighting, also very popular lighting in Hollywood. Compared with the pictures of Daimler AG, these pictures of MBNA have a more cinematic charm. The low angle shooting is called “Hero”, Americans like to look up at the car through a telephoto lens, which makes the car more stalwart. Yes, this is not a common viewing angle for consumers. Our eyes are at least 160 cm from the ground, at a focal length of about 50 mm.
Most of the shots were taken with 6 x 7 inches medium format film cameras with telephoto lens shot from far away on a tripod. these photos have very aggressive cropping techniques, and the final used photos may even be cropped off the eye level. Kodak Kodachrome film was used, which required complex development techniques, so they were sent to the nearest Kodak laboratory.
The old school Hollywood photography reached its peak in the late 90s. Rationally, with the development of image processing technology, these pictures have undergone more post-processing and modification, which includes replacing the parts and backgrounds, too. Maybe it’s not the most realistic, but can be said that the artistic value of the Hollywood genre is the highest among all the three genres, and it even cannot be reproduced today.
What happened next?
In 1990, when the world economy was on the eve of recession, Daimler AG and MBNA still took pictures for the most important products in the last decade regardless of cost. Later, despite the unsatisfactory commercial performance of the S-class, the rapid advancement of film photography technology and image processing technology made it possible to shoot at low density and produce masterpieces of higher quality. During its life cycle, the 140 almost passed the peak period of film photography. In the 21st century, digital cameras became the mainstream.
In my opinion, the change of camera has also brought about the differentiation of aesthetics. Digital camera photos were closer to reality, but people didn’t satisfied, film-style filters were added back in. In addition to imitating old film feelings, people have also used Photoshop to create contemporary style filters, and there are so many styles that anyone can have their own. If film photography is using a formula to fairly transform the real world, why do we use Photoshop to deliberately fabricate the color of the real world?
Today in automotive photography, CGI reigns supreme. Now multiple shots of the car are taken in different places in the studio illuminated by dozens of light bands, and Photoshop is used to disassemble them into individual parts, which are then stitched together to add an illusionary background. In my opinion, this is not just a change in technology, but a complete change in public aesthetics. Finally, we look at how two maestros see today.
“Imagine photography is a rain barrel and the photographers are the water. It used to be that the barrel had a inch or two of rain, but now the rain barrel is overflowing. The value of a photo is inversely proportional. Imagine if the same happened to another craft like dentistry where anyone could be a dentist? The Art of Photography has been lost.”
Clint Clemens
“These days we have a kind of model inflation. Mercedes used to have the S-Class and the E-Class, whereas you can hardly see the woods for the trees these days when you see all the different models. It’s even become difficult to categorise certain classes of cars since there are just too many different shapes and variations to make a clear distinction, which makes creating icons even more difficult.”
René Staud
All Photoreception articles are subjective, but there is a lot of reality in them too. Please do not reprint or translate these articles without consent.