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Review by Ann Shayne
" 'Every vehicle has a face,' says Mike Johnson, a twenty-nine-year-old builder and engineer from New Milford, Connecticut. 'The eyes are the headlights, the hood is the nose, and the grille is the mouth.' " Exactly, you will say, as you flip through these loving photographs of curvy trucks from years past.
So many faces peer out: the 1959 Chevrolet Fleetside, which looks like Charlton Heston; the 1949 International KB-2 which bears a resemblance to White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta; a 1946 Studebaker M5, which looks sort of like Porky Pig. As interesting as these trucks are their owners, a varied lot who use their pickups for everything from trips to the ice cream stand to planters during the summer. Some have compulsively restored their trucks; others are decidedly uninterested in period authenticity. One guy welded a 1977 Cutlass chassis to his 1945 Chevrolet body; another owner is unhappy if you open the door of his mint condition Studebaker pickup with your bare hands: "Skin has a lot of acid," he says.
William Bennett Seitz's saturated colors and careful compositions make these photographs special -- portraits indeed of these oddly human machines.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.
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