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I suppose most people will remember today for an exceptional Superbowl -it was a great game and maybe the most exciting finish ever- but I'll recall Superbowl Sunday 2009 for the Camera Van.
Looks like the camera display case at one of those Market Street stores in San Francisco , right? You know, those places with $200 stickers conspicuously marked down to only $80, still twice what you'd pay at honest retailers. Or maybe the window of a camera museum?
It's the Camera Van, the most impressive art car I've ever seen. There are artists around the country who decorate their car with art. I saw last year a van which looked like a three-dimensional map of a city. Buildings covered the van, plus green and blue areas for land and water. It was the City Van. Another car was painted to look like a Mondrian painting, and most recently I saw a van covered with Van Gogh's paintings.
The Camera Van has 2000 cameras and other photographic equipment attached. It's the creation of Harrod Blank. He had parked it on Shattuck in Berkeley for a private party at a restaurant. I just happened to be driving by a couple of hours before the Superbowl kickoff, but there was already a small crowd around the Camera Van.
This side of the Camera Van has a theme, it's a depiction of the famous Kodak camera, the Instamatic.
The front of the van has the owner's website, www.cameravan.com, in the top of the windshield. The cameras here are mostly Polaroids.
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A closer look at the van's right headlight.
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The passenger door reveals a Big Eye, with colorful filters forming the pupil and iris.
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The back of the van shows the Arizona license plate. Harrod Blank used to have a California plate, with about the same spelling.
Finally, there was something funny about cameras photographing cameras. And maybe something funnier about my camera photographing cameras photographing cameras.
For a look at the Camera Van website, visit www.cameravan.com. Harrod Blank has also made a movie about art cars, it's just been released. The movie is Automorphosis, and you can learn about it at www.automorphosis.com.
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