Photography by Armand Rosalie and Yannick Valentin
In France, we are in love with good food. To succeed in making a dish, you have to know how to apply a recipe, but to sublimate it you have to improvise. It’s the difference between Grandma’s good meals and those of a famous restaurant that does it by the book. In any case, sharing a meal with loved ones is always more enjoyable than eating alone in front of the television. I think that same goes for photography. In 2018, the fashionable movement is: take a picture, edit it, and share it. For car lovers like us, capturing a moment of life with your machine is always a pleasure, a way to make some memories last that much longer.
However, sharing it on social networks can be, and for many it is, a purely egocentric act, without any desire to have encounters or even interactions with the strangers who view your work. Some carefully-chosen hashtags are added as seasoning to these impersonal feasts of imagery, but there is more than just sitting around waiting for the likes and comments on the image to be satiated. This routine, probably exhilarating when you start out on the social media, is quickly tiresome. Making photos only to increase your audience is like eating a reheated carbonara pasta plate in front of a talk show: it’s tasteless. To remedy this, you could turn to actual messaging. Using this functionality, a platform like Instagram can become a version of a friend-finding app: hashtags become raw selection criteria, bringing you closer to people who share your interests. I established contact with some likeminded people in this manner, so with a tank of gas in my 325i, I went out to Paris to trade our photographic recipes in person. It was a weekend that led to the L’Image car and art show that we covered last month, but that was far from the only fruit born from this trip.
Saturday, 11AM, we are a group of three in my old Bimmer. Accompanied by my girlfriend, Cassandra, and Yannick, my frequent travel companion, we cross the Parisian boulevards after a five-hour drive from our city to the east of France. Our clothes merged with the seats. The capital city has put our car’s thermostat at 200°C and it feels as hot inside the cabin too—windows down, we cook in the heat.
Black cars are ovens, and swallowing kilometers is a conceit—in reality it’s the road that wants to eat us. And she doesn’t like to eat her dishes cold apparently. No need to announce this, my jalopy does it for us, resonating in the impasse. We’re here for good reason though, and can’t complain, because we are here for a good time. Garage Sunday is a project initiated by another friend of ours named Julien. The goal behind the meet is to unite people who love classic cars and photography. Whereas it could be a tool to go from point A to point B, the car becomes an excuse also to walk around, to look for photogenic places in our daily lives out of habit, to run after the natural lights and especially to spend time with friends. The exploration through Paris, without the cars, allowed us to get to know and spot some places to bring them the next day.
Therein followed two days of restaurants, drinks, and car rides through Paris for photographs. A simple, effective program, which allows plenty of time to discuss things outside of cars too. People will say they make us shut in and insular, but in fact, social media apps are the perfect tools to make a good recipe if you know what you’re doing in this particular kitchen. It’s a place where different flavors meet: friendship, good times, and our beloved cars. So talk to the people you follow, to the people that follow you, the experiences that can lead to are well worth it. In the spirit of this story, here are the accounts of the owners of the cars pictured here, should you wish to see more or make a connection of your own:
Yannick (Mini): https://www.instagram.com/
Julien (E12): https://www.instagram.com/
Pierre (Golf): https://www.instagram.com/
Charles (Mini): https://www.instagram.com/
Garage Sunday: https://www.instagram.com/
