Turquoise over white, the top folded down, and a plate that reads 56 DREAM. A 1956 Chevrolet Bel Air convertible sits in the lot with the late sun pouring over it, and it looks exactly like the decade everyone thinks they remember. This is the middle child of the Tri-Five Chevys, the year between the famous 1955 and the finned 1957, and to my eye the convertible is the best of the lot. Out at a Monday-night meet north of Toronto, it stops people in their tracks.
Turquoise, White, and a Continental Kit
Everything about this car is built for looking at. The two-tone runs turquoise along the body and white over the top and the rear cove, with a thin spear of chrome dividing them. There is a continental kit on the back, the spare wheel slung out behind the bumper in a body-colour cover, which makes an already long car look even longer. Whitewall tires, full chrome covers, and a turquoise dashboard to match the paint. I shot the front three-quarter, the rear with the continental kit, and leaned in over the door for the dash.
What a 1956 Chevrolet Bel Air Convertible Gives You Top-Down
A convertible with the roof down is a different photograph than a hardtop. You can see straight through it, front seat to back, and into the turquoise and white interior that most cars hide. I worked it both ways, top up for the clean roofline and top down for the openness, and waited for the sun to drop low enough to skim across the body. Low light on that turquoise is the whole game. It goes deep and electric where the sun hits and almost navy in the shade.
The Year After the Egg-Crate
You can tell a 1956 from the 1955 at a glance. Chevrolet dropped the small Ferrari-style egg-crate grille and stretched a full-width grille across the whole front, so the face sits wider and lower. Under it all is the same 265 small-block V8 that had arrived the year before. Only about forty-one thousand 1956 Chevrolet Bel Air convertibles were built that year, a small slice of production, and a clean one like this with the top down is a rare thing to find sitting in a parking lot.
I shoot all of this on the Leica Q3, available light only, no flash, nothing on the car touched or moved. The fixed 28mm keeps me close enough for the 56 DREAM plate and the Bel Air script and far enough to hold the whole long body. This is its own set, the convertible on its own, alongside the other classic cars I keep finding at these Monday-night meets in Richmond Hill, in the north end of the Greater Toronto Area.
Thanks for looking!
