Back to the Retrofuture: A Look to the Past in Tucker Fellows’ Present
San Diego transplant Tucker Fellows is a time traveler, not via a flux capacitor or way back machine, but with a Asahi Pentax K1000.
“I want a photo I took yesterday to feel like it's 50 years old, a memory recovered from a box of slides in an antique shop,” he said.
A sentimentalist at his core, he reminisces on days gone by. Days before his time, when air-cooled coupes and tail-finned convertibles dominated the cultural zeitgeist.
A gearhound that snaps photographs of rare grand tourers in his neighborhood of Bankers Hill and San Diego at large, Tucker approaches the vehicles as if they’re endangered species in the Amazon rainforest.
“I’ve been drawn to planes, trains, and automobiles that feel alive ever since I shot my first roll on a train when I was six,” he said.
He finds humanity in the form and function of yesterday’s chrome-plated, four-cylindered machines over the self-driving Teslas that embody our current look to the future. To him, as the son of a structural engineer, these cars point to an era of technical excellence that prioritized craft over consumption.
Inspired by the 1962 World’s Fair in Seattle and the Space Age’s influence on the automobile industry, his photography looks to “document and preserve a historical moment” when roadsters were built by aspirational futurists.
Even his choice film stock, Kodak’s Aerocolor (once meant for aerial surveillance photography), complements his love for bold colors, and infuses a texture of vintage science fiction to each exposed negative.
In essence, human subjects come secondary to the trail-blazing mechanical titans that demand attention.
“People act as an accent to emphasis scale in my photography … I’ve always favored capturing people at an objective distance.”
A small-town boy from Grass Valley, California, Tucker leans into the the spectacle of the wider world. He looks to the past when automobiles were once guiding lights to the boundless possibilities of our future and parks them at center frame.
To see more of Tucker’s work, check out his Instagram, where he regularly shares his work that delves far beyond the automotive world. “A digital photograph is an approximate reflection of reality," Tucker said. "A film photograph is a true reflection of a memory.”
Describing his work in his own words, Tucker adds: "I’m a curator of historic visual design, no matter what that design is involved with. I go looking for spaces that give an emotion as you walk through them, vehicles that give an emotion as they pass by, and the interaction of people with their unique environment. I show the presence of life, without the direct evidence."
