Car Girls

It takes an artist with the astute eye of Holland's Jacqueline Hassink to capture the actual oddness of the use of female models to sell cars. Hassink has already been acclaimed for books and exhibitions addressing issues of power and social relations, and Car Girls is a supreme instance of these explorations--a body of work that has taken more than five years to complete, photographing car shows in cities on three different continents. As Hassink affirms, she has used these sites to reflect on the differing cultural values with regard to their ideal images of beauty and women. The series captures the moments during the women's performances when they become more like "dolls or tools than individuals." In an issue of Aperture magazine, Francine Prose described Hassink's achievement perfectly, praising the work for its ability to "make us rethink the association between auto and eros as if it had never occurred to us, and to see it newly in all its sheer outrageous strangeness." Car Girls takes a subversively fun but conceptually smart approach to issues of gender, power and commodification. This luxuriously produced publication with a foldout poster cover is designed by Irma Boom and is limited to an edition of 1,500 copies.