THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY

This is not the first time we have asked former basketball player- Erica Lawrence - to travel to a far-off location so that we could fuse her magnificence with an equally spectacular car. First it was the San Bernardino Pass between Italy and Switzerland with a James Bond car and this time it was the heart of John Ford’s American West with a $60m Testarossa Ferrari. The car, driven by Sports Illustrated cover girl Brooks Nader, looks stunning against the iconic grandeur of Monument Valley and Erica’s body starts and finishes the story. 

We enjoy rolling the dice a little and embracing parody: it doesn’t pay to be too earnest in storytelling. Stories are just that - stories. Taschen’s book Wheels and Curves showcased photographs from the roaring twenties that played on the alchemy between female form and the early motor car. For many it brought two of the finer things in life together and this was to be celebrated.

 It is quite instructive that in the 1920s photographing this quite specific subject matter was seen as being a most laudable use of the camera. It was a category within the vast field of photographic subject matter. A photographer could turn his lens to landscapes, or war, or still life, but could equally photograph girls sitting erotically on cars. 

Ostensibly, it would seem little has changed in the last 100 years - David