Klein | Dieter

06/07/2020

Dieter Klein is a freelance photographer. A piece he wrote about robots won him the award for best reportage from the magazine Bild der Wissenschaft in 2003. But his true passion is the imagery of deserted automobiles. It won him prizes for best photograph at Discovery Days 2017, in Switzerland, as well as at Festival El Mundo 2018, in Austria. Dieter Klein regularly gives presentations and puts on slide shows about Lost Wheels and Forest Punk. Dieter Klein lives and works near Cologne, Germany.

Buy

The faded beauty of abandoned cars across Europe and the US

Dieter Klein has travelled to remote corners of Europe and the US to find and photograph abandoned cars. The German freelance photographer finds his subject matter in shabby backyards, dusty barns, deserted fields and thick forests. (…) The 160 images reveal the bygone glamour of the automobiles and classic cars – and the might of nature as it claims them. (…)

– bbc.com

Mesmerising photographs show once-gleaming vehicles abandoned and transformed by nature into eerie artifacts in strange and isolated parts of Europe and America

(…) Strange and isolated places aren’t everyone’s cup of tea – but they are where photographer Dieter Klein gets to work. He has been roaming shabby backyards, dusty barns, deserted fields and thick forests across Europe and the U.S to find and photograph once-gleaming vehicles left to rust and ruin. The mesmerizing results appear in stunning new coffee table book Lost Wheels – The Nostalgic Beauty of Abandoned Cars (…).

– dailymail.co.uk

A new book by photographer Dieter Klein contains stunning images of derelict classics in Europe and the USA (…)

– Octane, UK

(…) Klein finds beauty in the way that nature reclaims man-made junk (…)

“It all started in Cognac, in this French town in Nouvelle-Aquitaine, at the edge of a small village close by. I fell in love with Rosalie,” begins this book by Dieter Klein, the German photographer. Rosalie turns out to be not the local boulangère, but an abandoned 1935 Citroen that has at some point merged with an elderflower brush. Nevertheless, this is enough to set Klein off on a romantic quest to photograph cars left to rust and rot in garages, woods, scrapyards, caves and deserts in a colour palette that seems to have been hyped up for maximum fairytale quality. Many of these cars were once rather glamourous, but their glory days are long behind them. Still, Klein finds beauty in the way that nature reclaims man-made junk. His images capture plant life flourishing behind the glass of headlights, moss making its way over bonnets, and tress emerging from inside vehicles, through wat would once have been their windscreens. As a body of work it could be bleak; instead it’s rather hopeful.

– The Times, UK