It is the size that gets you first. A 1958 Lincoln Continental Mark III is nearly nineteen feet of car, a copper-coloured land yacht that needs a parking space and a half. Out at a Monday-night meet north of Toronto it sits among the Chevys and the Mustangs like an ocean liner docked next to sailboats. Then you walk up to the front and the details start, the canted headlights, the acre of chrome, the long flat hood you could land a plane on.
Canted Headlights and an Acre of Hood
The front of this car is pure 1958 excess. The quad headlights are set on a diagonal, canted into the corners of a full-width mesh grille, and everything is wrapped in heavy chrome. I shot it head-on and from a low front three-quarter to let the hood run away from the camera, because the length is the story. There is a copper-bronze paint on this one that goes almost purple in the shade and lights up like a new penny when the sun hits it.
What the 1958 Lincoln Continental Mark III Was Built to Be
This was Ford’s answer to Cadillac, the flagship, one of the most expensive American cars you could buy at the time, close to six thousand dollars when that was the price of a small house. Under the hood is a 430 cubic inch V8, and the whole thing weighs nearly five thousand pounds. Only about twelve thousand were built for the year across all the body styles, and the big rust-prone bodies meant most did not survive. Finding one this clean, sitting out on cracked asphalt, is rare.
The Breezeway Window
My favourite detail on the 1958 Lincoln Continental Mark III is at the back. The rear window is reverse-slanted, tipped the wrong way like a drive-in screen, and on these cars it powered all the way down into the body for ventilation. They called it the breezeway. In low sun the chrome frame around it and the gold star emblem catch the light, and the copper body curves away underneath. I spent more time on that one window than on the rest of the car.
I shoot all of this on the Leica Q3, available light only, no flash, nothing on the car touched or moved. The fixed 28mm is exactly wide enough to take in a car this long without backing into the next row. This is its own set, the Lincoln 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!
