What does your automobile say about you? A worldwide portrait of individuals and their rides, from Shanghai to Santa Monica | Pictures

In my novels I discover that I very not often write “a car” or “a van” or “a lorry” – I at all times are likely to specify the marque and the mannequin, typically with some pedantic precision. Why ought to this be so? After all, I’m a non-driver, somebody who claims to have the ability to drive (I did study), however who by no means handed his driving check. And but, paradoxically, I’m one thing of a automobile fanatic – a sort-of petrol-head, I confess – maybe a consequence of spending many hours, or perhaps that must be years,  behind minicabs that conveyed me right here and there round London. In my lengthy expertise of minicab use I’ve discovered that almost all conversations with minicab drivers typically find yourself being about automobiles. I’ve realized rather a lot.

There is another excuse why I wish to specify. I’ve a conviction that the kind of automobile, or car, that you just drive is as a lot an expression of your persona as the garments you put on or the decor of the house you name your individual. Even the blandest of mid-price automobiles – the Toyota Prius, the Kia Picanto, the Volkswagen Jetta, for instance – are making a covert assertion about you, the proprietor. You selected that automobile – and your alternative is surprisingly eloquent.

All that is by the use of a preamble to Martin Roemers’ Homo Mobilis, a exceptional collection of pictures of individuals posed with the assorted automobiles they drive. Moreover, these pictures, I’d declare, bear out the thesis that the automobile, the van, the lorry, and so forth, are an extension of, and a window to, their proprietor’s persona and, fairly presumably, a sign of their worth system as nicely.

Roemers has ranged far and vast to {photograph} the assorted automobiles that catch his eye. Among the numerous nations he’s visited are the US, India, Ukraine, Senegal, the Czech Republic, China and the Netherlands. And the kind of car he pictures is equally eclectic – not simply automobiles and vans but in addition campervans, invalid trikes, handcarts and minibuses, people-carriers, ice-cream vans and tractors, road-rollers, donkey-carts, motorbikes and hearses. The number of automobiles on show is astonishing however one’s eye is inevitably extra drawn to the eccentric: the mud-splattered, multi-dented taxis, the rust-badged household saloons, the lurid paint-blistered lorries, the MOT-challenged, spavined minibuses.

However, Roemers’ stroke of genius is to have eliminated the geographical and concrete context of the automobiles in his pictures. Richard Avedon shot his well-known 1985 collection of portraits, In the American West, with the themes seated in entrance of a very impartial, starkly white backcloth. The impact was to pay attention all consideration on the sitter. These human beings turned totally what they introduced to the digicam lens – there was no distraction, no prop or identifier past the options of their face and no matter gadgets of clothes had been seen. It was a uniquely desolate and unsettlingly graphic type of portraiture.

Roemers has cleverly adopted the identical approach and has remoted his automobiles and their house owners and passengers by erecting an enormous white fabric backdrop draped over an armature of scaffolding and has parked the automobiles and vans in entrance of it. The vans and lorries, three-wheeled scooters and autorickshaws look as in the event that they’re caught in some huge, empty snow-field. It’s the similar Avedon-effect: all focus is concentrated on the car and its textures and patinas, its colors and contents, in a means that makes them appear extra like an artwork set up or some type of weird trendy sculpture. The proven fact that these pictures are, successfully and primarily, about modes of transport appears secondary. It’s the aesthetic dividend that resonates in these pictures. Never has a decrepit jalopy appeared extra intriguing, and, in an odd means, shot on this method, it has change into an exquisite object in its personal proper – its type abruptly separate from its mundane operate.

The one additional commentary I’ve just isn’t a lot a critique however a form of praise. Roemers’ distinctive car pictures may run and run, because it had been – the subject material is nearly infinite, in spite of everything – however one finds oneself questioning if the demographic might be prolonged. The automobiles, taxis and lorries in these pictures are largely owned by poorer, hard-working folks as their scuffed and dilapidated technique of transport testify. What would Roemers make of soccer-moms of their large 4x4s? Or government chauffeurs with their shiny Mercedes S-Class limos or 7 Series BMWs? Or well-heeled boy-racers with their Lamborghinis and Maseratis? Or cyclists with their bicycles? It’s a tribute to the whole success of this photographic enterprise that we will ask for extra, please.

The author Stephen Bayley, in his e book Death Drive, declared that: “Cars have a talismanic quality. No other manufactured object has the same disturbing allure. More emotions are involved in cars than in anything else we make or use.” Roemers’ work in Homo Mobilis establishes the reality of that assertion and likewise that the attract of a given car doesn’t essentially have something to do with value or design or exclusivity. “We are what we eat” is a tried and examined truism; these very good pictures set up that “we are whatever we drive” is simply as legitimate..

Homo Mobilis (Lannoo Publishers) is priced at £50. To help the Guardian, order your copy for £45 at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery prices might apply.