The colour photographs of vintage cars were taken in the French museum that houses the Schlumpf collection, and show its most prestigious pieces. Paradoxical as it may sound, this series continues the vein begun with the black-and-white Car Crash works of 1998, inasmuch as it too sets out to give a sense of objects that have been “lived in.” If the photographs of wrecks show the body to be absent, here the cars themselves to have taken the place of the driver to become the sole protagonist of the photograph. A bit like a ghost, the car comes across as the incarnation of its deceased owner. In order to achieve this illusion, Valérie Belin worked with a wide-angle lens which accentuates the streamlining and dynamism of the car. The effect of the optical artifice is to make the object seem to have its own, living energy.