The Inner Life of Things: Road Roller

Some inanimate objects seem full of character, to have a kind of machine-consciousness. I felt like that about this small road roller, which I photographed in Coonoor, in the hills of south India.


I altered the photograph with a Lomo tutorial, and copied the background from a Soviet propaganda poster.

fonts: Kremlin, tahoma
elements from designerdigital.com:
Katy Pertiet roughed up solids finest paper pack
Anna Aspnes finding my way fotoframe

2 comments:

LaVieQ said...

Haha! Very nice - it reminded me of some of the Vietnamese propaganda posters I saw earlier this year. Without the word "cute," of course.

It wouldn't have occurred to me that road rollers could be object of our affection, but your poster version sure looks nice. A hero (or heroine) in communist attire waving a red flag from the seat and your slogan would've been a good juxtaposition.

Perhaps it's just nostalgia. I still remember some of the roads in Madras being widened in the 1960's by such machines trundling around making clunky and crunching noises, while men wearing improvised foot coverings of jute bags - held together at the ankles with strings wound around their legs - leveled the steaming piles of asphalt ahead of the rollers, and, the heady smell of molten tar wafting from the steaming road would assault the nose, leaving me giddy, as we drove by the work site carefully...

ashok said...

Hi Nancy, Coming to your blog after a looong time.Lost your link after coming back from Kabul...need to catch up a lot! Hope alls well..