In 2019, TBW Books published Gus Powell’s *Family Car Trouble*, a project whose punning title points to its real subject: three nouns that cannot stay separate. Powell’s photographs record the arrival of children, the loss of his father, and the upkeep of a 1992 Volvo 940 station wagon, and they treat these events as one continuous negotiation. The book’s design furthers this claim. Powell and TBW Books shape the sequence as a photo novella, borrowing the novel’s architecture to organize intimate material into something that reads like a narrative rather than a set of discrete pictures. The photographs move between a young family and an aging parent, between the comic indignities of car repair and the unhurried fact of grief.
The humor in the book is structural, not decorative. The Volvo’s stubbornness gives Powell a way to approach his father’s illness without forcing the images into elegy; the car keeps breaking down, the family keeps going, and the narrative holds both facts at once. What could have been a claustrophobic account of loss becomes instead a study of maintenance, in every sense. The book’s scale and pacing—128 pages and 74 plates in a compact hardcover—support this intimacy, allowing the sequence to accumulate rather than announce.
This is Powell’s third book, following *The Company of Strangers* (2003) and *The Lonely Ones* (2015), and it shares with them a documentary attention to ordinary people. Here the people are his own. The book has been discussed as a new classic of the “Automotive Bereavement Parenting genre,” a phrase that captures its odd tonal balance. Its photographs are not confessional in the usual sense; as Elisabeth Biondi has observed, there are no pictures of Powell himself, yet he is present throughout. That absence is part of the book’s method.
For collectors, *Family Car Trouble* belongs in the company of photobooks that treat the family as a formal problem as well as a subject—work in which the book’s sequence, design, and scale are inseparable from its emotional argument. It is a modest object by design, and its ambition is correspondingly precise: to show how life and death, motion and stillness can be held together in a single binding.
