Michael Radford – Crash
Staple bound in glossy soft covers with French flaps, with minimal textual elements and simple visual design, Michael Radford’s Crash looks unmistakably like a sales brochure. The reference to sales is reinforced by the embossed title in a font resembling a manufacturer’s logo and the exaggeratedly large ISBN number in the same font on the rear flap, which turns visually into a serial number of something else than a book. So the question is, what does this book sell?
Radford’s photographs show dangerously sharp edges, peeling paint, rust, bunches of wiring and maybe chemical reactions from leaks, carefully lit to echo the artificial materiality of these objects and the glistening allure that they must once have had.
The ostensible subject is crashed cars, hardly fit for selling. The photographs are full-bleed, close up shots of mangled metal; images of seriously damaged car bodies with their saturated, synthetic red, blue, green, gleaming white and sparkling silvery paints, and, in a few cases, engines and cracked windows. They show dangerously sharp edges, peeling paint, rust, bunches of wiring and maybe chemical reactions from leaks, carefully lit to echo the artificial materiality of these objects and the glistening allure that they must once have had. Radford clearly does not shy away from showing the manufacturers’ emblems; they are often firmly within the frame and unabashedly visible. They also suggest that the book intends to do more than show abstract photographic compositions, since they anchor the images in reference to something quite specific. BMW, Bentley, Porsche, Mercedes Benz—this glossy brochure shows us the glimmer of luxury, high engineering and super powerful engines gone wrong.
So, what is this book saying about car sales and supercars? Is this simple schadenfreude: “Look, here, someone who was able to afford a car of this price had an accident”? Or is this perhaps a photographic quotation of the work of César, the 20th-century sculptor who compressed consumerist detritus, including car parts, into minimalistic cuboids? It would feel too simplistic to read this as merely enjoying the spectacle of someone else’s misfortune—at least I would hope that this is not the point. As for making an art historical reference, this might be a part of the message here, even if not fully intentional (it is, naturally, impossible to judge intentions without text to guide us).
There is, at the very least, no avoiding the clear connection between Radford’s Crash and the British author J.G. Ballard’s 1970s novel with exactly the same title. The parallels between the two books are too obvious to ignore. Ballard (in)famously wrote about a disturbing form of sexuality that gained arousal from car crashes, both voyeuristically through observation and by causing and being party to them even to the point of self-destruction (the book begins, “Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash”). Beyond the obvious point of Radford and Ballard sharing the book title, Ballard’s Vaughan also takes photographs of the crashes that feed his sexual appetite. Ballard’s language describing the crashes, their victims, and the interaction between human and machine bodies and parts during and after a car crash also often evokes a sense of photographs or slow-motion moving imagery. There is even a moment when Vaughan’s sex act with a prostitute (whom he is inhumanely exploiting to re-enact a crash scene to satisfy his libido) is described in terms that make it sound like a fashion shoot: “a series of stylized positions.” And the medical terminology deployed in the book brings to mind clinical photography, including autopsies and diagnostic photographs of injuries, which are compositionally close to what Radford’s images look like, albeit that he shows us technology rather than human bodies.
With this connection to Ballardian dystopic fetishism, Radford’s book begins to seem like a comment of some kind on the energies that drive the human being to invest time and effort—and of course money—on developing, selling and buying items such as luxury cars with more horsepower than anyone could ever need in everyday existence. The book might be asking whether this is a simple fetishistic process of libidinal energies being displaced onto an inanimate object. This must, however, be at most a part of the point here, since we are clearly not looking at these cars in the shape that presumably titillates the car fetishist.
By glorifying driving accidents with accomplished photography and binding them into a glossy sales prospectus, Radford seems to poke at the deepest, most basic psychological impulses in the human mind.
The book appears rather to attempt to speak of something more complex. As a fetishised brochure of forms created by crashes, the book does steer uncomfortably close to suggesting pleasure taken from the sights shown here. But perhaps that’s also part of the point. Maybe the book seeks to represent contradictory libidinal forces that turn into opposing ideologies—Sigmund Freud called this process sublimation—which generate the dualistic, polarising mindset we see all around us in Western systems of politics, philosophy, language, and technology (think of the binary code that, in essence, conditions our entire lives these days). On the one hand, we have the force of money, refined technology, efficiency, speed, built out of the sheer possibility of doing so, regardless of the impact on other human beings and the environment. On the other hand, we have the force of the scarcity of resources, thrift, concern for other human beings and what we do the planet.
Interpreting the book this way, it is very close, whether intentionally or not, to Ballard’s suggestion of Crash being a techno-pornographic novel about how ruthless human beings are in exploiting each other—and everything else, for that matter. There is little doubt that there is a curiosity in all of us about the misfortune of others. The familiar phenomenon of ogling a car accident is of course a fitting example in relation to Radford’s book. But who has ever seen, for example, a politician victorious in an election appear troubled by their opponent’s loss? We are, perhaps for reasons of evolutionary development, hard-wired for putting ourselves, our own needs, ideas, wishes, friends, families etc., first; and for ultimately doing what is necessary to keep things that way, even if it means, in extreme circumstances, considerable sacrifices. At times, perhaps even often, it seems in many contexts that genuine empathy and understanding of viewpoints that even just appear to differ from one’s own is in short supply.
By glorifying driving accidents with accomplished photography and binding them into a glossy sales prospectus, Radford seems to poke at the deepest, most basic psychological impulses in the human mind. His book provokes an uncomfortable realisation that one might see these images as fascinating on some level, despite them showing obvious misfortunes of our fellow beings. Maybe that’s what the brochure sells: discomfort in exploring what really drives us and how difficult it seems to be to find compromises that might benefit us all.
Michael Radford
Edition Taube 2024
