What I Didn't Photograph at Concorso d'Eleganza

I have been doing automotive photography for about four years. That's a lot if you count the nights spent culling images, the kilometers driven chasing frames and the people met along the way. It's not much if you end up at Concorso d'Eleganza Villa d'Este, standing next to cars where the word "rare" feels like an understatement. At many of them I didn't really know what I was looking at. I knew the atmosphere of the event, I knew its legend, but I didn't carry a mental catalog of histories, bodies and chassis numbers. Sometimes I had to read the placard and only then try to catch up on what others had known for years.

Concorso looks like a set someone arranged by a lake and then forgot to mention it wasn't a film. This year's edition, mid-May 2026 in Cernobbio on Como, brought fifty or so cars from around the world, surrounded by a crowd that could itself have posed for the camera. The water reflected the sun, the chrome, the light shirts of the guests. Wooden Riva boats glided across the surface, polished to a degree that they could have parked on the concours lawn themselves. Below the villa's facade, people moved more slowly than usual. Linen, tweed, hats, conversations held at half-volume. Behind it all, the mountains.

Cars start to read differently in a setting like this. They become part of the landscape, and you no longer just walk around them, photograph them and tick them off. I lingered longest at the Bugatti Chiron Profilée, the last one-off version of the model. It stood slightly off to one side, against the warm ochre-yellow wall of the villa, next to neatly trimmed greenery. No big crowd, as if someone had parked it there in passing. I couldn't stop looking, partly because it was a Bugatti, but more because the whole picture was absurdly good. The silver body, the Italian villa, the silence, the light. A car normally associated with speed and noise had quietly become something calm.

Then I saw the Volkswagen W12 Nardò. And there I really was a kid again. Dark brown, low to the ground, doors that opened upward, an interior in honey leather, a wooden steering wheel. I had no idea this car would stop me in my tracks the way it did. Only later did I read up on its history and learn that this strange record-setting prototype had won its class. On the spot, something simpler mattered. I was standing in front of something that looked like someone's bold idea from an era when manufacturers still allowed themselves strange dreams, and that dream had actually been built.

That's how most of the day went. I moved between cars whose histories I didn't know well enough, but I could feel their presence. The long pre-war bodies looked like boats. The Italian coupés carried an elegance no spec sheet could capture. Every so often I caught myself just standing there instead of taking a photo. For a photographer that sounds like a system error, but for me it was probably the most honest reaction I had.

Only after I came back did I match the images to names, and only then did this year's theme, "Future needs Heritage", begin to mean something to me. The jury's top prize went to the BMW 328 Bügelfalte from 1937, a roadster whose beauty comes from proportion and function. The public chose an icon, the 1963 Mercedes 300 SL Roadster. And in the class of cars aging without full restoration, the De Tomaso Mangusta won, because sometimes patina is proof that a car has lived.

A few steps away, the future was showing up. The Vision BMW Alpina spoke an entirely different language from everything around it, a preview surrounded by memories. Nearby, a few other sketches of tomorrow, led by the award-winning Kimera K-39. That contrast was one of the strongest things about the whole weekend. Machines decades old still stopped people mid-step, while the future was still looking for its place. At Como it stood beside history and tried to have a conversation.

At some point it hit me that I didn't want to take as many photographs as I had planned. I kept shooting, but I stopped hunting. I didn't want to push for every frame, wait nervously for someone to step out of the background, or pretend that everything had to immediately turn into content. It was too beautiful to treat purely as work. For a moment I wanted to be part of the picture and not just the person recording it.

And that was harder than I thought. When you make photographs, you quickly learn to measure things by outcome. Is the frame strong, did the light land, will anyone remember it? Even in a place you've dreamed of, a voice at the back of your head tells you to do more. A better shot, a different angle, one more lap. I talked about it with Kamil Koźlarek, about the drive to keep improving, about how you do something well and a second later you're already thinking it could have come out better. That conversation hit exactly what I had been carrying through the whole trip. I was standing inside one of the biggest automotive dreams I'd ever had, and still I caught myself asking: is this it? Is this really happening? Fulfillment arrived quietly, and only later did I realize I was supposed to notice it.

So I started looking wider, at people as well as cars, at gestures as well as details. My favorite photograph from this trip doesn't have a car in it at all. It shows an older couple on a stone wall right by the lake. They sit, look at the water and simply take the moment in. In the background, a mountain, a boat, leaves above their heads. There's no spectacle in it and no concours winner, and yet when I saw them, I thought they already knew something I was still learning. That sometimes the most important thing is to sit down and not try to squeeze more out of a moment than it offers.