The Worst Thing You'll Read About Cars Today
Can anybody tell me what this opening sentence means? But it gets worse. Much worse.
Panorama, the official magazine of the Porsche Club, was redesigned a few years ago, under the direction of Pete Stout. There are a couple decades' worth of the magazine in my basement; I've been a PCA member since 2002 or thereabouts but I also bought a substantial archive of Panoramas from the Seventies and Eighties when an older PCA'er in my region decided to simplify his life. Prior to the Stout era, "Pano" was a stodgy little book, featuring a consistent but extremely boring design theme that was vaguely related to Porsche advertising of the past thirty years. I primarily read it for the classifieds, but once in a while you'd find a nice historical piece or technical deep-dive in there.
When Stout redesigned it, Panorama went roughly from octavo size to super or imperial octavo size and the quality of the photographs, I'm told, went through the roof. I really couldn't say. I'm part of Generation X, which means that I grew up reading magazines with terrible photography and/or illustrations. Other than the Ichiro Nagata pistol-porn that I'd occasionally see in American Handgunner and the like, I never really paid attention to the putative quality of photographs.
For better or worse, I always thought of photography as fundamentally feminine. It's observational, receptive. During my years as a BMX rider, I kept running into people who had decided to make it their life to be "action sports photographers", standing around trails or skateparks waving their cameras and videos at us. I always thought it was kind of pansy-assed. Why would you take a picture of somebody jumping a set of doubles when you could strap up and jump the doubles yourself? Better to be a lousy rider than a great photographer.
Writing, on the other hand, always seemed essentially masculine. You're telling a story. It's the same role that our prehistoric ancestors assigned to the senior men of the tribe. Most of history's great writers have been men; to prove this to yourself, ask ten well-educated people to name their favorite male writers and then ask them to name their favorite female writers. You'll get ten very different lists of men and ten fundamentally similar lists of women.
As a society, we intrinsically understand that writing is superior to photography. That's why books full of photographs are derided as "coffee-table stuff", to be flipped-through while one is waiting for something more important to occur. Yet photography and its bastard child, video-making, have risen in this age to outshine the written word. You can blame the short attention span of Millennials, you can blame a culture that takes children from the outdoors and places them in front of a blinking screen for hours at a time, or you can blame a soaring rate of functional illiteracy.
While all of those are certainly contributing factors, I think the biggest reason people are turning to photography over writing is their perception that photography is value-neutral. Even in the age of Photoshop, most of us see a photograph as being essentially "true" while text is, at its core, biased and argumentative. A photograph of an automobile is value-neutral, or at least perceived as such; a review of an automobile is biased. We've now raised thirty years' worth of human beings who are uncomfortable with explicit value judgments and whose reaction to polemic or rhetoric is to retreat to the nearest safe-space hugbox for reassurance.
No surprise, then, that the Stout-era Panorama is praised from all sides. Truth be told, however, I've thrown the last few years' worth of issues directly in the trash. If you want to understand why, this will help. It's not really writing as such; it's gushing over what is probably the worst and most depressing Porsche in the company's history. The purpose of it is to convince more people to buy a Macan. This kind of drivel doesn't serve the readers, and it certainly doesn't serve the interests of the Porsche Club of America, which won't survive the next decade if it relies on Macan owners to fill its rolls and attend its meetings.
If the old air-cooled 911s were like the poetry of Eliot or Pound --- difficult yet rewarding, fierce in their division of opinion --- the Macan is like a big coffee-table book full of gorgeous photos. It's easy to understand, easy to approach, easy to consume, just as easy to forget and throw away and replace. Here's another thing about photography: people don't remember it. Think of the ten greatest things you've ever read. Now think of the ten greatest photographs you've ever seen. Could you even do it? QE to the motherfucking D, my friend. And that won't change, even after the media society turns our minds into paste.