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PJ: Have you ever run into a situation where a car was gone when you went back to shoot it?

BC: Yeah, there was a 1918 Republic truck that belonged to the family of a friend of mine. I went out and shot it one day but it was in a grove of locust trees and the light was nasty, it was just horrible. So I decided to go back and reshoot it. After that someone stole it. Someone actually went up in the woods and hauled it out of there and probably cut it up for for the metal value.

PJ: Are you the one that found out that it was missing or did the family tell you?

BC: They told me it was gone. That’s not the only time that I’ve gone back and a car is gone. There was a King Midget; it was in Dover, it was the middle of winter and I didn’t like the way that it was sitting and I couldn’t get a good shot of it. So I decided to go back in the spring. When I went back it was gone. That kind of burned my butt. That’s generally another thing I’ve learned: that the time to shoot it is as soon as possible. A lot of cities have regulations that you can’t have a junk car in the yard. Even in the country they’ll get somebody if they have 50 or 60 cars laying around, which is a shame because a lot of times they’ll end up going to scrap. I’ve met guys that say "Oh it’s too bad you weren’t here a year ago, I dug a big hole and buried all those cars." I’ve run into two of those where they just buried the cars. It’s a shame because some of the parts from those cars could have used to keep other ones running.

PJ: Which car has been the toughest shoot for you?

BC: That one with the tree growing out the side of it, the Fairlane. It wasn’t necessarily that one, but it was some of those on that guy’s property. It was late spring, I believe, or early summer and the thorn bushes were just awful. I was really into it (the shoot) while I was there and I came out a bloody mess. It was worth it though, that guy had some stuff, just amazing stuff back there: there was the 57 Ford, that Buick out in the tall grass was there, and the 46 Ford by the dirt road was also there, about a 100 feet back. There’s also a 47 Packard and a couple of other cars not included in the series.

PJ: All of your photos for the series in black & white?

BC: I’ve shot about a third of them in color, but overall I like the series as a whole in black & white. Good quality black & white looks better than color made into black & white. You can scan the color into black & white fairly well but I think that you are really missing something whenever you do that. I pretty much shoot them just in black & white film now. I think that you get a better negative to start with and then when I go to do manual prints of them it’s a whole lot easier than it is to do black & whites off from color negatives. It’s just a bear to do that.

PJ: What kinds of film have you used in the course of doing this project?

BC: I’ve used Fuji Neopan black and white, which is nice stuff, I’ve used Kodak Vericolor 160, some Kodak Portra 160, it’s nice stuff. I’ve done a little bit with T-Max, I’ve used some Fujicolor 100 and now I mostly use Kodak Tri-X P. I like that a lot.

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