Petrolicious - Article

Help Kickstart This Award-Winning Automotive Photographer’s Coffee Table Book

By Alex SobranOctober 25, 20178 comments

A certain degree of talent is required to make inherently artistic objects look more intriguing in photographs than in real life, and on both technical and emotional levels, the work of Communication Arts award-winning photographer Bill Pack achieves the difficult feat. Formally educated as a commercial photographer at the Brooks Institute, Pack has since spent decades performing and perfecting his craft, creating a body of work that reaches across an expansive spread of consumer and industrial design; products you’d find in your kitchen drawer to the megalithic architectural staples of the world’s hub cities. 

His work with cars is the focus today though, seeing as he’s gathered a collection of his best work on the subject in a beautifully bound coffee table book of some 348 striking pages, called V – 12 – 1. You can be an accomplished photographer and create some nice automotive images, but you can tell Pack loves cars beyond their use as something to shoot. You get a sense from just a few frames that this is somebody who might be browsing classifieds like the rest of us. It’s art in every sense of the word and not un-abstract  but it doesn’t feel like it’s been created from a place of aloofness—not at all.

Highlighting marques and models from a slew of time periods and provenances, he connects it all through technique more so than any one type of car. You’ll see lithe, liveried racing machines from the late 20th century and pre-war behemoths from the early end of it inside the sewn-bound hardcover, but regardless of their shapes and functions each is given the same treatment; that is, a high-contrast exploration of their design.By perfecting the use of light to “paint” the bodies, he literally highlights the definitive curves and lines of these cars in both his detail shots and full-car perspectives, offering at once the cars’ best-known elements and presenting entirely new views of established icons.

The book will be laid out with full-page photographs that will include a few two-page spreads as well. The sewn binding makes it such that the open book lays flat on the coffee table of your choosing, and the pages are printed with four-color process inks. Point being, the presentation suits the quality of the work itself. 

To support this book and to find out how to obtain a copy, including limited editions, please visit its Kickstarter page, linked here.