On their worst days

Some old-car enthusiasts dig old car wreck photos. I don’t. It’s not that I’m psychologically scarred by an old crash; it’s not that I don’t want to see imperfect representations of the cars we normally enjoy seeing in pristine condition. It’s not that I have a weak constitution and am morally outraged at the Ballardian aspect of it. It’s not that I’m denying my mortality. It’s probably more because I see it as a voyeuristic exercise, one step removed from rubbernecking on the highway, taking grotesque pleasure from somebody else’s misfortune, even if blood and guts aren’t in the picture. Morbid curiosity, to me, seems something you grow out of after adolescence.

So why link to the Salem, Massachusetts, police department’s collection of old crash photos? (Thanks, by the way, go to diskojoe for pointing these out, along with the story behind them.)

Though I thoroughly condemned the practice of viewing such photos above, I can also see their attraction. If we’re to be honest about the way things really were in past decades, then such photos are the natural counterpart to the normally bright and pasteurized picture we paint of old cars. And if you look past the destruction, you see that these aren’t apocalyptic photos – they’re simply scenes of everyday life interrupted by misfortune. We like browsing through Shorpy for the street scenes; we like flipping through yellowed copies of TIME for the glimpses of how we were. So why not get the whole picture, both good and bad?

Of course, I can’t bring up this topic and ignore the aspect of how much damage really was done to these cars. Some are mangled beyond recognition; some came through okay. We don’t have crash data – speeds, angles, injuries – so we can only infer the context. But it’s enough to make a man ponder the forces involved in a collision as well as his own driving technique.

Nor can I bring up this topic and ignore my harsh comments regarding the IIHS 50th anniversary test earlier this year. Safety is not something we can ignore when surrounded by hurtling multi-ton masses of steel, as some of these photos prove. I still question the necessity of smashing a perfectly good old car, especially after seeing this evidence, which is probably typical of the crash evidence gathered in every town in every state in the country at the time. Perhaps if every PD across the country shared photos like this, the IIHS wouldn’t have felt the need to crash that Bel Air.

As the Salem PD’s description of the photos notes: “The photographs published on this website were not picked for their ’shock’ value, but for the history they contain. The photos show an era long since gone.”