Towards Crash

The automobile is a powerful cultural figure that embodies individualism, the implosion of time and space — all the liberating promises offered by triumphant ideologies of technology. It’s a machine that has coevolved with the city and directed the course of urban development, deeply shaping our lives in the process. In fact, nowadays modern cityscapes cater more for cars than for human beings. The automobile accident is the cemetery of all these dreams.

A certain cryptic logic suggests itself, a kind of technological unconscious. For all the planning and analysis that supposedly goes into the rational management of the technological systems that support us, the automobile acts as an extension of our irrational side. The car is a prosthetic shell that paradoxically exposes our egos and instincts, amplifying and releasing them from the usual social protocols. Automobiles tune into the repressed currents stirring beneath the surface of our minds—the frustration, violence, anxiety, or plain boredom and distraction.

From a review by Andrés Vaccari of Jeff Busby’s book of photographs called “Amplification”.