The Story Behind the Print
I came across this weathered classic sitting in front of a small house in the rural town of Queen, Pennsylvania, and cautiously approached the porch to see if I could get the owner's permission to make a photograph. The front porch was complete with a makeshift Confederate flag posing as a window curtain, but what truly caught my attention were the few hundred empty brass bullet casings scattered across the floorboards. After several minutes of unanswered knocking, a next-door neighbor walked over and told me it should be fine to shoot, assuring me the owner was a nice young man. Deciding to roll the dice, I carried my heavy gear out onto the grass and set up the tripod.
I had just started to compose the cascading chrome bars of the grill on the large ground glass of my panoramic wooden view camera when the peaceful silence of the day was shattered. A vintage pickup truck—outfitted with a stocked shotgun rack in the rear window and a large flag affixed to the back bumper—roared up, pulling to a sudden stop just a few feet away from me in the grass. The owner slid out of the cab wearing sleeveless white flannel, old-school mirrored sunglasses, and a distinct Skoal tobacco tin print pressing out of his front pocket. I braced myself for the confrontation, but after giving me a hard stare, he looked at the massive wooden camera and smiled.
We ended up having a great chat. He proudly told me he had just towed the car to this exact spot the night before to kick off a full restoration project in a few days. This photograph stands as a precise, fleeting record of the machine's long history of neglect, captured at the absolute tail-end of its decades on the grass before it was hauled away to be renewed. The straight-on perspective turns the crumpled steel hood, hollow headlight sockets, and deeply oxidized finish into a balanced, symmetrical exploration of pure industrial character and graphic line.
The Panoramic Process
This heavy mechanical face was captured onto a single sheet of traditional black and white film using an ultra-large-format 8x20 wooden panoramic view camera. Working with a negative of this monumental scale requires a disciplined, highly deliberate physical cadence out in the field—an unhurried process that stood in stark contrast to the loud, sudden arrival of the truck. Because there is absolutely no digital stitching, artificial distortion correction, or multi-exposure blending in post-production, the final print retains an immense level of raw visual honesty. Made directly from a high-resolution drum scan of the original negative, the archival print preserves every deep pitting mark in the weathered steel and the fine metallic textures of the decaying chrome, bringing a true physical piece of disappearing heartland history straight to the wall.