A strip of old tape stretched across a cracked headlight; green plastic knotted over a door panel; string holding a bumper in place. These are the subjects of Ronni Campana’s *Badly Repaired Cars*, published by Hoxton Mini Press in 2016. The cars run from Bentleys to Vauxhall vans, each mended with whatever came to hand, and the photographs were made in different parts of the world.
Campana is a still-life photographer, and the book shows it. The camera moves in close and stays there. The vehicle as a whole is cropped away until the repair itself — tape, string, mismatched paint, a sheet of plastic where glass should be — occupies the frame. A length of tape becomes a graphic mark; a hanging panel divides the picture like a colour field. The joke in the title survives, but the image has been pushed a long way toward abstraction.
The object is modest: a 72-page hardcover, roughly 18 by 14.5 centimetres, in English. The scale is not incidental. These are pictures of surfaces, and a small page turns close looking into part of the reading. At this size the seam between a manufacturer’s finish and an owner’s improvisation is plainly visible, and the wit of the sequence never hardens into condescension toward the people who made the repairs.
The series also exists as exhibition prints — inkjet, 60 by 40 centimetres — so the book is one form the work takes rather than its only one. Its subject places it in a long documentary interest in improvised repair, but it withholds the anecdote such photography usually supplies. The title appeared in a year-end round-up of 2016 photobooks, and it sits on a list largely built around East London subjects, here widening its frame.
For a collector, the argument rests less on scarcity than on concentration: a single conceit pursued across a whole book without dilution, in a compact and carefully made edition. Campana’s later title, it is worth noting, was catalogued under the same publisher’s photography line, and this earlier volume reads as the clearer statement of the method.
