Humor: Photographs of Cars with Their Namesakes

Art director Jim Lasser and his friend, photographer Ray Gordon, have a humorous ongoing photo project titled Namesake Motors. They observed that car makes and models often have names inspired by (or similar to) famous people or people groups, so they decided to shoot a series of images that play on words by pairing the cars with their namesakes (using the term very loosely).

The photograph above is titled, “Homer’s Odyssey.”

Adam Carolla’s Corolla

Alice Cooper’s Mini Cooper
Queen Victoria’s Crown Victoria
Lincoln’s Lincoln
Pontiac’s Pontiac
The Lone Ranger’s Ranger

The project got started after Lasser, who works in the advertising industry, spent a number of years working with the car companies Dodge and Chrysler on advertising campaigns. He tells Jalopnik:

I have always been interested in history, and began to wonder about the origins of some of the names of the cars. It raised a lot of questions for me: who was Chief Pontiac? Would Lincoln drive a Lincoln? What would Queen Victoria think of all these cops driving a car named for her?

I had the idea of staging these characters in classic (or un-classic) cars of their names. A photographer friend of mine in Portland, Ray Gordon, was someone I immediately thought of to capture this kind of thing. He loves cars and loves weirdo ideas like this. When I pitched him on it he loved it, but told me he didn’t want to just “talk about it”, he wanted to do it…so we did.

The two guys ended up gathering a number of other people to help with creating the characters (doing the hair, makeup, costumes, etc.).

A single person modeled for all of the photographs in the series: Lasser himself.

Lasser actually shaved himself bare for the Pontiac photo, and stood for an hour in public dressed as Queen Victoria.

He tells us that they’re going to create at least 5 more photos for the series in order to turn the images into a calendar. They’re open to ideas for the last five cars/characters. If you have any, leave a comment to let Lasser know!

Namesake Motors (via Jalopnik and TOP)


Image credits: Photographs by Jim Lasser/Ray Gordon and used with permission

Discussion