Thomas Barrow (1938 – 2024) made his three-part portfolio The Automobile in 1964-65 while studying at the Institute of Design in Chicago. The Automobile formed his thesis project and looked at the role cars play in American culture. The series looks at three stages of car ownership: on display in the showroom and at car shows; rides and drivers; and the junkyard.
“I was living outside Chicago, in Evanston, and had a part time job on the South Side, so I’d spend at least two and a half hours in the car every day,” he recalled. “So I saw these photos as an extension of my thinking about spending so much time in the car.”
Much like Mike Mandel did in 1970s California, Alejandro Cartagena in Mexico and Chris Dorley-Brown in 1980s London, we see drivers at the least guarded.
“Now, the car really is fun. It’s got privacy, heat, AC, music. It’s still a rolling bedroom for many. And this is a very hard thing to break. India and China are starting to come out of poverty and they want cars more than TV or anything else. It’s still a powerful symbol of freedom, and I’m not sure how that will ever be broken.”
– Thomas Barrow
Thomas Barrow graduated with an M.S. in photography from the Institute of Design. He began his career as Curator of Exhibitions at the George Eastman House and then became the museum’s Assistant Director in the early 1970s. Later, Barrow moved to New Mexico, where he was the Associate Director of the Art Museum at the University of New Mexico. In 1976, he began teaching photography in the university’s Art Department. Thomas Barrow is Professor Emeritus of Photography at the University of New Mexico. His photographs are in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the George Eastman Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Black Dog Collection, and the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson, where his archive is also housed. – Joseph Bellows
“In painting you don’t have to paint an objective image, you make a thing with paint and maybe it’s objective and maybe it’s not. It’s really hard to use the camera, which records objects, life, and push towards greater and great unrecognizable images.”
– Thomas Barrow
