(…) 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