…
You’ve seen those Smart cars, right? They’re cute and super tiny—so small that I’ve always thought of them as a jacket you can drive. You know, you sort of just pull one on and go.
Kai-Uwe Gundlach recently shot a campaign in New York featuring this garment-sized car for a new car-rental service called car2go, which originated in Germany and will make its stateside debut in Austin, Texas, this fall. (The agency was BBDO Düsseldorf, and Ton Hollander was the creative director.)
What I like about his photos is that he creates a personality for car2go. And that’s important. This is not a vehicle that one pitches based on its looks or powerful performance features; this is a service. It’s the steady supporting character in your busy life, always there for you but never in the way, never demanding.
“Our task was to come back home with ten great photos,” explains Kai in an interview about the making of the campaign. “Half of them were predefined: for example, two managers meet in the park and somewhere in the background there’s a car2go. Or an elderly married couple walks through the park, looks at the skyline of New York, in the background there’s another car2go. Another scene: two female students shopping in Chinatown, in the evening they go out, car2go is in the vicinity. In the focus of the pictures was always mobility, not a car. So it was not a car shoot in the conventional sense, but the visualisation of a concept: car2go is simply there when you need it, but doesn’t impose itself! In the focus were the people, the city, mobility.”
In fact, in quite a few of Kai’s photos, you have to look a second or third time to see the Smart.
…
All photographs by Kai-Uwe Gundlach.
Wouldn't it be cool if cars ate hotdogs instead of drank gasoline? Somewhere in the world, someone's probably working on that...
…
You can see the complete car2go campaign here, at Kai’s website.
…
….
