The Beautiful Car Crash

Statistics show that approximately 83% of the British population have either been affected by a road collision directly, or are close to someone who has – that’s roughly 4 in every 5 people who view these images. Yet, despite this statistic, it is shockingly common for people to pay little or no regard to road safety – let alone the consequences of ignoring it. Aside from this, thanks to road safety campaigns such as the "TH!NK" campaign, if we stop and think about it, we are more than aware of how horrific a car accident can be.

This body of work is designed primarily to entice its viewers. Your attention is caught by the aesthetically appealing abstract images, and it’s only then that the meaning behind them can become apparent. The images, which are all abstract images of accidently damaged vehicles, are designed to create something beautiful out of something that by its nature is nothing short of horrendous.

The images visual enticements are also linked with the appeal of sexual desire – an idea taken from David Cronenberg’s "Crash" (1996), a film in which people find sexual stimulation in car accidents. This is also linked by the text on the images themselves, which are each the names of famous pornographic movies and act as the seemingly obscure titles for each of the individual images.
The text on the images places viewers in the position of a disimpassioned voyeur, connected with the pornography through the text and the car crash through the image, yet, completely separated from both.

The series of images imply through their multiplicity that accidents such as these with often terrible outcomes, are just another factor of life to be reckoned with, and though often unthought-of, are daily experiences worldwide. The images themselves are not traumatising, but rather conditions of our psychological and social lives.