“Frozen Speed – Identities on Wheels”
By Joes Segal
For roughly one hundred years, we have come to realize that our existence amounts to less than a tiny speck of dust in an immeasurable universe. But humans have always been inventive in creating their own compensatory mini universes. We shape our private worlds within the confines of our homes, and we cherish ourselves in the self-created bubbles of our families and friends, our clubs, political parties, cities, nations, cultures, religions, and other communities of trust and exchange, safeguarded by mostly artificial and objectively random borders.
One such mini universe that tends to evoke strong feelings is the car. Cowboys are nothing without their horses, and modern people cannot exist without their cars. As German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk puts it, “In modernity the Self can’t be conceived without its movement – metaphysically, it is inseparable from its vehicle.” In his Homo Mobilis series, Martin Roemers shows that the car is not only an extension of the human body but also its reflection. Dogs tend to resemble their owners, and so do cars.
Vehicles of transportation lead a double life: they are both a means of transport and a tool for self-expression. In his earlier series Metropolis (2007-2015), Roemers focused on movement, showing traces of cars cruising through the streets and boulevards of megacities in long-exposure photographs. With Homo Mobilis, he chooses the opposite perspective: the cars, trucks, vans, tractors, motors, and bicycles are shown in complete stillness, brought to life by the people inside, outside, or on top of them. By photographing his scenes against the backdrop of a white cloth, these images become icons.
The sacral connotation is meaningful as some people tend to venerate their cars with religious fervor, treating any careless behavior in its vicinity as sacrilege and personal affront. According to French essayist and philosopher Roland Barthes, “cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals […], the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not in usage by a whole population which appropriates them as purely magical objects.” Several world religions have a tradition of car blessings to protect the vehicle and its passengers against accidents. Roemers almost concludes his series with an Indian priest blessing a new Suzuki.
Car magic extends to all the senses. The aesthetic choice between a small and elegant Fiat-500e or a bunker on wheels like the Tesla Cybertruck might speak volumes about the psychological constellation, if not the political preferences, of their buyers. Roemers has telling examples from different cultures, including some richly decorated vans, buses, rickshaws, and bicycles from India and Senegal and the exquisite Chinese minicar with grandmother and child painted in the style of traditional Chinese landscape painting. A car can also make a visual statement, such as the organic farmer sitting in his Dodge painted as an American flag, the Czech car museum director using a Trabant to advertise the museum and its cafeteria, the Afghan carpet seller in India turning his car into a rolling advertisement, or the Indian advocate and climate activist who added a rooftop garden to his car.
Among the other senses, the auditory experience stands out, from the soft gliding sound of electric vehicles to the crackling of loud motors, sawn-off exhaust pipes or supercharged engines, aggressive honking, and audio speakers ruthlessly booming into the secluded worlds of other mini cosmos creators. Car smells can vary from the pleasant aroma of the upholstery of a new car to the often less enjoyable propensity of the car to circulate cigarette smoke, perfume, or aftershave. That is, of course, unless the perfume imitates the upholstery. American comedian Rita Rudner claimed that in order to attract men, she wears a perfume called “New Car Interior.” Of course, Roemers’ ice-cream vendor cars from India and Santa Monica add a whole new dimension to automotive flavors, not to mention the tricycle chicken car from India.
Historically, the car has an association with toxic masculinity. In the founding manifesto of Italian Futurism (1909), the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti evoked a speeding car as symbol of modernity at a time when the Blitzen-Benz racing car could already reach a speed of over 200 kilometers per hour: “We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath … a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” For Marinetti and the Futurists, the worship of speed went hand in hand with misogynistic aggression: “We want to glorify war – the only cure for the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.”
In that sense, it might not be a coincidence that the idea of the democratization of the automobile was high on the agenda of the most antidemocratic politician in modern European history, Adolf Hitler. In 1937, the Nazis produced the Volkswagen (“People’s Car” in English translation) as an affordable commodity for the masses, to be used on the expanding network of freeways (the Autobahn, also known as “Strassen des Führers”, Streets of the Führer) to connect German cities and accommodate smooth military transport in the process. By compressing space and time, the car knit together the National Socialist “Volksgemeinschaft” (literally: people’s community).
In postwar Western Europe and the United States, car ownership quickly became something of a self-proclaimed right, and with the rise of the suburbs, life without a car became close to impossible. Women also became more and more dependent on cars to go shopping and bring children to school or to their leisure activities. Notwithstanding, in car ads and feature films of the period, the vast majority of drivers were men. It was only since the 1960s that car-driving women became more prominent in mass media, but at the same time a concurring trend in advertising started to combine fancy cars with sexualized women, conflating two objects of male desire.
In Homo Mobilis, however, men and women seem to have equal car agency. Four selfassured women and a dog from Los Angeles pose inside and in front of a red Chevrolet Impala, the car as cool as themselves, and four car sales employees from Senegal are depicted with a woman behind the steering wheel and a man in the back seat. Even in rural North Carolina, it’s the woman who decides where the car is heading. Roemers depicts cars and other vehicles in a variety of uses, from means of transport to status symbol, place of commerce (see for instance the beautiful open sewing-studio car from India), or living quarters. In 2025, many of the estimated 29,000 unhoused people in “car city” Los Angeles use their cars as mini apartments. Roemers portrays a Mexican immigrant, an expressionist artist, a musician, and a retired construction worker as car dwellers, a reminder of the combination of astronomical rent prices and a minimalist social security and pension network, and the fact that the city attracts many more creatives than it offers opportunities to engage in a subsidized creative career. Note that the musician and the retired construction worker are sharing their humble abode with one or more pets.
Homo Mobilis covers car cultures from different parts of the world, showing both the cultural specificity and the commonalities that all of us humans share. In communist countries like the Soviet Union and Cuba, where everyone was supposedly equal, car ownership was nevertheless a clear indication of status and social standing. Wait times for unpretentious cars like the Lada in the Soviet Union, the Škoda in Czechoslovakia, the Dacia in Romania, or the Trabant in East Germany could rise to over ten years; the more elegant ones like the Volga or ZIS-101 were only affordable for high-up party, military, and secret service members, cosmonauts, movie stars, and sports heroes. As the quality of Soviet Bloc cars was usually below par, the art of car maintenance was held in high esteem, as is still the case in Cuba and many countries of the Global South.
In Car Cultures (Routledge, 2001), a volume of essays edited by Daniel Miller, anthropological field researchers analyze different uses of the car in different cultures. For instance, Diana Young describes in her contribution how Aboriginal Australians, instead of rejecting the automobile as a modernist intrusion, have integrated the car into many of their spiritual rituals. According to Daniel Miller, people in Trinidad are more often identified by the car parked in the front of their house than by their house number. And Jojada Verrips and Birgit Meyer describe how in Ghana, where many people depend on their cars for their income due to the lack of a functioning public transport system, car mechanics are often venerated for their spiritual as well as their technical proficiency, based on their ability to miraculously resurrect a vehicle that seemed beyond repair. Roemers has a couple of photographs of Senegalese taxi drivers in their rickety cars that you sense will keep rolling until an ill-fated passenger sinks through the rusty bottom.
Italian film director Federico Fellini famously included the act of filmmaking in several of his feature films, creating a Brechtian effect of “breaking the fourth wall,” consciously disrupting the illusionary world of theater and cinema. Roemers does the same, where he takes a step back and shows his setup in context, so that the shopping couple from Shanghai emerges against the backdrop of a construction site, and the Indian ice cream vendor seems to be parked in a lush garden. These context images disrupt the association with stillness and instead show these frozen moments as part of a larger reality. The other aspect that somewhat contradicts the iconic character of the photographs are the people. Whereas the saints of icon paintings are frozen in a state of eternal timelessness, Roemers’ car people are very much alive, dynamically (in one case even acrobatically) interacting with their vehicles as integral parts of their mini universes, creating their own realities.
Joes Segal is Chief Curator and Director of Programming at the Wende Museum, Los Angeles.