New photobook Cracks and Dents captures the strange beauty of vehicular damage

We like scuffs, scratches and scrapes. It’s the time of the re-emerging analog, the easily battered, flaking leather, bobbing sweaters, and the tick of clockwork. People buy cassette players knowing if they break, there’s nearly nobody who will repair it. People are transitioning back over to wired headphones from the played-out bluetooth. Could it be that there is something unsatisfying about the nonexistent tactility of the digital cloud – which increasingly seems like an entity closer to magic than a man-made machine? Lycien-David Cséry has made his debut photobook in lieu of physical damage and sensation, aptly titled Cracks And Dents.

A dazzling series of photos focusing on mangled car parts, Lycien-David focuses on materiality, traces of use, and visible signs of transformation. “I think a lot about what we choose to live with: the pristine or the broken, and how form, colour, and surface speak to us over time,” says Lycien. Tapping into a current cultural obsession with physicality, Lycien’s photobook speaks in a bygone language – chipped paint, crumpled metal, exposed interiors.

“I think a lot of people react to mechanical damage with a kind of stress – like when there’s a scratch on something new, it really bothers them. It’s quickly seen as a flaw, as a loss of value or function,” says Lycien-David. Although consumer preciousness around the mint condition of objects has increased, cultural reactions to J.G Ballard’s prophetic Crash and the seductively self-destructive film adaptation by David Cronenberg reveal a renewed interest in mechanical disfigurement. “For me, it’s not about what’s ‘broken’ or ‘damaged’, but about accepting that traces of use are part of life.”

Cracks And Dents doubles as a reclamation of the impairment of vehicles and a reclamation of human imperfections – when looking at speckled paint, cracked windshields and streaks of warbled material, it creates a parallel between freckles, scars and stretch marks. “I see those marks not as defects, but as something natural – even meaningful,” says Lycien-David, refusing to perceive damage as dramatic breakages but more so just small parts of narrative emerging to the surface. “I’m not interested in perfection. Actually, it’s the imperfections that give things character and presence.” Unlike the aforementioned Crash, Lycien’s work isn’t tied to the idea of fetish or masochism, but celebration and storytelling. The photos in Cracks And Dents inspire openness and light interpretation, allowing meaning to be dictated whenever and wherever.

Cultural differences helped to buoy the photobook’s subject of the automobile. Lycien-David noticed the juxtaposition between German cars – polished and strictly regulated, whereas in California, damage was visible and rules around aesthetic perfection were looser. Witnessing cars as extensions of everyday social life in the United States, Lycien felt stimulated by Americans’ intimate relationships with their transportation. “It’s a kind of mobile living room. That closeness to the car, that everyday intimacy, became part of the work almost naturally,” says Lycien.

Although experienced in digital photography, Lycien focused on film stocks for this project, specifically 35mm and medium formats. As opposed to the hyper glossy idea of California, Lycien kept seeing sun bleached tones, ambers and rust which were uniquely captured by the warmth of film. “It helped shift the focus to texture, to surface, to the material presence of things,” says Lycien. With film’s unparalleled capacity for capturing tiny details, Lycien’s photos catch essential pockmarks and peppered pigmentations that would otherwise get lost in digital noise. Besides, it’s what the people want to see. Wear and tear is unavoidable – Lycien’s revelatory photobook just wears its tear on the sleeve for everyone to see.