In automotive PR photography the cliches are plentiful, and one of our favorite cliches is the car parked right next to a swimming pool. Here are a few fun examples. 

Here at Mac’s Motor City Garage, we’re all about vintage automotive publicity photos. They’re our stock in trade, you could say. We get endless enjoyment sorting through them, in all their vast and colorful variety, to select the illustrations for our historical features, and sharing and discussing them with our car biz friends. You can find some recurring themes in factory PR photos through the years, of course, including cars and airplanes, cars and golf courses, cars at construction sites, and maybe the most curious setting of all: cars parked right next to swimming pools.

Seriously. Who parks a car next to the swimming pool? How does that make any sense? From a marketing point of view, the composition seems almost plausible. Swimming pools signify luxury, leisure, and prestige. But in reality, cars don’t belong there. Swimmers don’t care  to be exposed to all the noxious fumes and fluids, and meanwhile, the engineers tell us that placing a heavy automobile so close to the pool’s walls will damage the structure. But never mind all that for the moment as we simply enjoy the silliness of one of our favorite cliches in PR photography: cars + swimming pools.

The classic swimming pool location shoot is most frequently used by the luxury car brands, but here little American Motors got into the act with this colorful image of the 1962 Rambler American 400 convertible. AMC sold 13,497 of these little beauties in ’62, though how many were parked next to swimming pools is unknown.

Gazing Narcissus-like upon its own reflection is this 1957 Lincoln Premiere Landau, the FoMoCo luxury brand’s first pillarless four-door. Lincoln lagged a year or two behind the rest of the industry in offering a four-door hardtop body style.

The swimming-pool theme isn’t unique to photography. Pontiac’s masters of illustration, Art Fitzpatrick and Van Kaufman, used it as well, for example in this beautiful painting of a 1962 Bonneville Custom Safari, the flagship wagon of the Pontiac division that year.

With a base price of $5,738, the 1954 Cadillac Eldorado Convertible (below) was one of the most expensive passenger cars on the market that year, and one of the most luxurious, with power everything and chrome Kelsey-Hayes wire wheels. The message here, apparently, is that movers and shakers can park wherever they like.