Photography Was The Death Of Automotive Journalism

...but a good photographer has more value than you'd expect

i assure you this is not the most scandalous photo of davey g out there

When Frank Greve interviewed me for his landmark piece in American Journalism Review almost thirteen years ago, one of the first things he asked me was, “Why is all this shit you guys write so bad?” Instantly I composed a stirring defense of all that was good and pure in our business, from the tireless and ethical work done by yours truly to the lyrical and heartfelt pieces penned by one of my favorite side pieces at the time — but some sort of reality-oriented circuit breaker tripped in my head before I could say it, and I was forced to respond with,

“Uh, yeah… well, it is, I suppose, but…”

My eventual answer to that question turned out to be even more true today: the bulk of the autowriting you see out there is bad because the manufacturers do everything possible to make it bad. They host press events where you spend three nights in a five-star hotel and six hours with a free drink in your hand just so you can drive three pace laps on a coned-off racetrack. They methodically remove press privileges and vehicle access from anyone who is critical of their product in an unapproved fashion. (What I mean by that: you can’t criticize a new car unless you offer strong praise as well, you can’t ever refer to potential long-term reliability or usability issues, and you must reserve all your true feelings about a car until its successor is in showrooms.) In the case of Porsche and a few other “important” automakers, they will exercise the privileges of prior review and/or post-publication editing (for digital) if they think you’re doing anything to hurt sales or the corporate image.

Let’s not even get into the modern mommyblogger/influencer trend, where access is taken away from half-decent autowriters and given to people who will be uncritical advocates for the product via their social media channels.

That accounts for most of what you see, hear, and read nowadays. But what about those rare situations where:

• the prestige of your publication makes it hard for the manufacturer to lean on you;

• you have unfettered access to the car on your own terms, or close to it;

• the budget is there for a racetrack rental, or travel, or both, plus plenty of fuel;

• there is very little in the way of editorial control standing between you and an honest review of the vehicle?

Those situations do exist, mostly at the full-service magazines like Evo or Road&Track. Sure, the dipshits from “The Drive” or “Jalopnik” have to make do with a cattle-call intro event, followed-up (if they’re lucky) by a few days driving a loaner version of the car to the grocery store or their day job — but a print publication with a million readers can often demand a week with a brand-new, properly-specified car away from the corporate minders, anywhere from Carolina Motorsports Park to the Furka Pass in Switzerland. This goes double for the British magazines which have long been granted a considerably longer leash for editorial opinion:

maybe you shouldn’t have lifted in mid-corner, ya fuckin mook

Yet the majority of what you read in those magazines remains mind-numbingly bland. It’s not just that you don’t get adequate or ethical criticism of the vehicle in question. It’s that the articles often feel like travel-blog entries with a light season of generic commentary. “We went from $HERE to $THERE and along the way we ate at $RESTAURANT and we discovered that the $VEHICLE_IN_QUESTION is pretty nice, you should buy one, it has $SPEC_SHEET_DETAILS and offers $MATHEMATICALLY_MASSAGED_PERFORMANCE_NUMBERS.” One would expect that three or four days of fast-road driving and track use would generate some sort of insight, but all too frequently it does not.

Your humble author is currently engaged in re-reading about 100 issues of Car and Driver from the glory years of 1975-1985. In most cases, this is the third time I’ve been through a given issue, having read it upon publication as a child and again in my twenties via the microfiche reader in the well-stocked Columbus Metropolitan Library. Not all of it holds up as well as I would like. There’s a lot of lazy/sloppy wordsmithing, bad driving, and box-wine-grade elitism that I don’t remember from my ecstatic tween-aged initial consumption.

(For the record, Bedard and Sherman really were that good, while Davis, Yates, and Lindamood are much harder to enjoy than they were four decades ago.)

Yet the overall standards of a 1979 Car and Driver would be impossible to approach nowadays. They’re openly critical of the cars. They are openly critical of the government. They are unashamed advocates of driving fast in all conditions, even if the definition of “fast driving” in 1979 was about the pace demonstrated by the average Dollar General employee behind the wheel of a 2008 F-150 XL nowadays. Most of all, the majority of the articles are entertaining. They are fun. They make you want to drive a car — as opposed to the average Extremely Online car review today, which feels like an advertisement for both the vehicle involved and the worst sort of Mark Ruffalo champagne socialism.

In short, those old magazines are great to read. To read. What about to look at?

Put aside for a moment that the vast majority of C/D pages were in black and white because it just didn’t matter. Can you imagine either of these two blurry, glare-soaked monstrosities making it into a modern car magazine? Here’s the modern equivalent, from my M2 vs Camaro test of 2019:

Here’s some irony for you: that picture was taken by Hearst journeyman Marc Urbano, a man whose professional abilities were roundly shit upon by pretty much everybody I knew at Road&Track. The management would fight tooth and nail against using Urbano, because they hated his work. Unfortunately for the management, Urbano was essentially “free” because his salary was paid by the corporation, as opposed to their preferred freelance photographers whose cut would have to be budgeted against the article. I liked Marc and never saw any problem with what he did, but it was also widely believed in the business that I was blind as a bat and couldn’t tell a good photograph from a cave drawing, accusations which are painful both for their unkindness and their demonstrable truth.

If the Car and Driver of 1979 was a literary product that used photography for occasional illustrative purposes, the color magazine of 2023 is precisely the opposite. The photography comes first, last, and always. A respected senior editor at Hearst once told me, “You can make up the story afterwards, but you can’t make up the pictures.” (He’s free to speak up and claim that statement, if he likes; he’s a valued ACF subscriber.)

Every single review or feature I ever did for a major publication was biased in terms of time, effort, and cost towards photography. We would spend an hour driving the cars at speed if we were lucky then spend four hours taking pictures. In most cases, the photographers or art directors would determine the agenda, the route, the schedule, and pretty much everything else. The final length of the article would be determined by how it fit around the pictures.

This stupidity wasn’t limited to American magazines. I was once explicitly told by a famous CAR editor that “we spend three days doing photography then pretty much make the story up afterwards… based on truth, of course.” So all those tales to which we collectively thrilled, of David-and-Goliath battles between Murcielago and Renault Megane, conducted at breakneck pace on the foggy B-roads to Betws-y-coed? They were lies. Or stories. Or fiction. Whatever you want to call it.

for every great backroad shot there will be four hours of this

During the nine years in which I wrote features for print magazines, I became increasingly frustrated by the single-minded focus on how the story looked as opposed to how it read. The reason was always the same: very few people can appreciate a well-written article in the 21st century, but we all have eyes and pretty pictures sell magazines. Better still, photography doesn’t get you an angry call from PR. It doesn’t cause people to cancel subscriptions (well, apparently C/D had some photos that really upset people back in the day, topless women and Rampage 2.2s in the air and so on) or call senior leadership. It is utterly harmless.

I learned to despise certain photographers — and since this is Avoidable Contact Forever, I’m happy to name a few of them. Evan Klein is a man with an intense visual gift, but he did all of his “motion” photography at 5mph in neutral gear, rolling the car by hand with the exposure open. We did a lovely piece on the BMW i8 together that went so pear-shaped he openly declared his intention to kick the shit out of me on the final day of our trip. Don’t get me wrong. I’d donate three pints of blood to him tomorrow, but professionally we are incompatible.

(In Evan’s defense, he spent three days of his life on spec helping me do a Million Mile Lexus piece with Alex Roy, so I owe him three days of my life at some future time.)

Robert Kerian and I worked together once. Once. He was so cruel to his assistant that I found myself responding to him in portions of syllables because I was afraid that any complete sentence I attempted to produce would end in the Judge Reinhold 100%.

I did a piece a while back where the photographer kept asking me to unbutton and button my coat next to the car. This is something I do one-handed, because I’ve been wearing suits since I was six years old. “Do it with two hands, like James Bond!” he yelled.

“Daniel Craig is white trash, and so are you,” was my response. There was another fellow, a name I’ve happily forgotten, who pissed his pants in a press car next to me going down Mount Evans, then said it was my fault for driving too fast.

“And yet my pants are fine,” I replied. The next day, he tried to wrestle my hand off the radio knob because he was tired of hearing Hiromi Uehara’s brilliant Voice album, with Anthony Jackson and Simon Phillips. For the record, we listened to it three more times.

We’ll talk about “Puppyknuckles” another time. For the record, I never hooked up with his girlfriend. Never even tried. Not even after they were broken up. All I ever did was look after him and treat him like a little brother — albeit one who can’t show up to a gig on time, as opposed to my actual little brother, who was a professional musician in the laudatory term of the word as well as the technical one.

Beyond that, there were dozens of times when I simply lost a day of track driving or actual vehicle evaluation because a photographer was slow, or bad, or overly insistent that he get backup shots for everything. Here’s one great example: I had to drive the McLaren Senna for the first and only time on track in the pouring rain because we used up all the good weather taking pictures at 20mph. I literally called my son and told him I loved him before I got into the car, because I knew that:

• I had no intention of driving beneath what I believed to be the limit of the car;

• I had no way of knowing if my beliefs were correct.

I have spent hundreds of hours in my life standing outside in weather ranging from “Death Valley” to “monsoon” so photos could be taken, lost dozens of chances to drive a great car at high speed, gave up countless amounts of sleep for “golden hours” and out-of-the-way locations. I’ve been in situations where I got the automatic version of a car for the test and then the photographers got the stick shift, or where I had a 200-mile limit in my hands so the photographers could take the car an additional 300 miles to a scenic location and back. I’ve had to cut pace in vehicles because people got carsick, or their camera equipment got banged around, or the photo car couldn’t keep up.

All of this because the average media executive would rather look at a picture than read a story. Here’s the irony: the photographers who destroyed my enjoyment of automotive journalism are now being forced to yield to videographers, drone pilots, and so on — or they’re being forced to learn those skills themselves. Time marches on and the same low-attention-span dipshits who only looked at the pictures in magazines now have children who can only consume video.

If you think photography is time-hungry… my God, video is a nightmare. All of these idiots think they are Martin Scorcese and will burn a day to get a single shot. It will only get worse from here on out, because the average CONSOOMER can’t accept anything short of The Grand Tour, irrespective of what it actually costs in time and money to do those kinds of shots.

Here’s a prediction: nobody will ever again do a magazine that is as good as those old C/D issues, because it was the writing that made them both enjoyable and memorable. History will see photography as an odd halfway point between the satisfying act of reading and the all-encompassing experience of high-def, 3-D video. It will be like the harpsichord or something. And that’s fine with me. Apres moi, le deluge.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention some photographers who went out of their way to help the poor downtrodden authors among us, so:

Jamey Price did magazine stuff briefly before moving to F1 full-time. He worked fast, never asked for something to be slowed down or faked, and had a knack for showing what a car looked like on the move.

Matt Tierney literally risked his life to get this shot; a few tenths of a second afterwards he rolled out of the way and I swept the Viper past him with the tail still out, about where he’d been. No worries. We’ll just go down to the pound and get a NEW art director!

Andrew Trahan is one of the finest and kindest human beings imaginable. He also makes things happen in a hurry and understands that there are words around his pictures.

Cameron Neveu is a driver and racer who understands what drivers and racers want to see in a photo. Like Jamey Price, he’s one of those photographers who is oddly handsome and should probably be in front of the camera rather than behind it.

Those shooters whom I forgot, or perhaps unfairly maligned, should find comfort in this: I’ve never taken a single photo that anyone thought was any good. So how much could my opinion possibly matter, anyway?