Before We All Had Digital Cameras, I Was a Photographer for Auto Trader Magazine
My now-obsolete summer job
In the early 2000s, digital cameras existed, but not everyone had them. People needed to sell their cars. People wanted to buy cars. Auto Trader magazine was the solution, and I was one of their photographers.
“Sell your car fast! …We’ll take the photo!” — Copy from the cover of a 2005 issue of Auto Trader magazine
In one of the summers when I was in college, in 2004, I applied to be a part-time field photographer for Auto Trader.
Auto Trader still exists as a website, but it used to be a magazine filled with ads of people’s cars for sale. The ads were mostly black and white; I think color ads were an extra, more expensive option. You would find the magazine asserting itself in a business-like stack in gas stations and grocery stores and other random everyday places. Each page was a grid with rows of cars. There would be a small photo of the car and a written description in small, neutral lettering, along with the owner’s contact information.
The purpose of the job was to take photos of the cars for the ads. First, people called Auto Trader and bought ad space for a future issue. Then Auto Trader sent me to those customers’ houses to take digital photos of their cars.
The pictures didn’t have to be aesthetically pleasing. They just needed to exist and to depict the whole car in the most static, generic way possible — in the frame and relatively in focus. It wasn’t the type of photography that had glamour or skill or that would build one’s portfolio. This was workmanlike photography, producing pixels for a specific purpose.
Back then, most people didn’t have a digital camera good enough to take a print-quality photo of their own car. We didn’t have advanced cameras and GPS in our pockets, let alone video.
We hadn’t yet fully crossed the bridge between the analog and digital worlds.
Therefore Auto Trader hired me, loaned me a squat, brick-like digital camera, and paid me to drive around to take pictures of people’s parked cars in their driveways, on the street, or outside their garages. They paid a set amount for mileage, which I tracked (minus the miles for getting lost), and $6.50 per photo. Unfortunately I don’t remember anymore whether that was per photo taken or per photo published. Either way, it didn’t add up to a lot.
The preparation
Every morning Auto Trader emailed me a list of addresses, along with the descriptions of the cars I would photograph. I then put the addresses into MapQuest, one by one (remember MapQuest?), and printed a stack of directions.
Back when we used MapQuest this way, we had to remember to print out the directions for both trips— there and back. If you were feeling daring, you could neglect to print the directions back and just navigate from memory or reading the directions backwards.
I looked at the emailed list of the day’s locations and figured out how far each house, with its assigned car, was from my apartment. Then I made a plan for the day based on going from my apartment to the closest house, then the next closest house, and so on, and printed MapQuest directions to match that sequence.
I had a paper road atlas as my backup. One of the big, hefty state road atlases that you keep just in case, at least I still do. I learned how to use a map from this job. So many times, the MapQuest directions would get me close to the destination, and I’d be forced to read tiny type on a map to find someone’s particular street.
Even with these modern navigational tools, I would often get lost. I’d have to pull over and read the MapQuest, scrutinize the map, and try to figure out where I was and how to get where I was going. Part of the job was re-centering myself after discouraging wrong turns.
I had a cell phone back then but it did what cell phones used to do — function as an emergency contact device and incredibly slow texting tool.
Each day I loaded my car with my stack of printed directions, my map, the camera, my Liz Phair CDs, and some snacks or a packed lunch, and hit the road.
The daily process
With this digital camera, I was somehow powerful. I didn’t always encounter the customers, but when I did, I was polite and upbeat, because the job was also customer service. They also tried to be pleasant and upbeat, because I was in control of the critical step that they needed to be completed in order to sell their car.
There was a protocol for the pictures — a straight-on front picture, side profile pictures, the back, and the front angle photos. To get the angled ones, you would stand in front of the car and slightly off to one side to capture the car’s right or left front corner as the focal point and the rest of the car receding from there. That was the one shot that, if a customer was watching, might have seemed to require some small bit or expertise or training. Basically, my boss at Auto Trader had taken me out to the parking lot behind the corporate building for five minutes and shown me how to stand to one side to take that kind of photo.
Sometimes people paid Auto Trader for the ad before I arrived to take the picture, but sometimes I needed to get the money from them. Some left the cash for me in an envelope under the windshield wipers. Sometimes the car owner was there (not my preferred outcome), and they gave me payment in person.
At one of the locations, a family that couldn’t read English asked me to come inside and read some legal documents aloud for them, which I did. They gathered around, an older couple and a young woman, as I read them a few pages about some court proceedings having to do with the couple’s son.
One of the customers had a huge house and a koi pond outside. I went to the door to request the money for the ad, and someone in a bathrobe answered the doorbell, opened the door a sliver, told me the envelope with the money was under the welcome mat, and shut the door.
At another house, a man walked with me into his grassy extended backyard where his car for sale was parked. He asked me if I was married. I wasn’t, but I said I was. “You’re not wearing a ring,” he said. “I don’t always wear it,” I replied brightly.
Some customers enjoyed getting involved with the photo shoot, not realizing that these pictures were going to be what they were going to be and neither of us could change that. A man with a vintage car supervised as I walked around and took the standard shots. “I think it looks best from this angle,” he said. “Yes, it does,” I said, humoring him, framing the car from that angle, and pressing the shutter.
Somehow the process seemed outdated even then. At the end of each picture-taking week I drove to the Auto Trader corporate location, which was in a bleak industrial park, to upload my photos. There were two computers designated for this purpose. Sometimes a fancier staff photographer in a shirt and tie (perhaps his job was to take glossy cover photos) would be using it when I walked up, and I’d wait my turn. Then I’d upload my photos, submit my dutifully filled out mileage record and checklist, and turn in the ad money I had collected. When I quit the job at the end of the summer I handed back the camera.
I don’t think of this job often but when I do I mostly remember the time on the road, driving, listening to music, just going from place to place. And I think about how I had a job that is now obsolete, a relic of a brief moment in history. I didn’t keep any of the issues with my photos in them. My car photos looked the same as anyone’s car photos. But sometimes I wish I had kept one or two magazines, just for the novelty of it. Apparently some of the old issues of Auto Trader magazine are collected now.
