The plate reads OUR 1965. Not MY, not a joke about horsepower, just OUR, which tells you two people share this car and have been sharing it for a while. It is deep burgundy, the top is down, there are two small Canadian flags clipped to the windscreen and a pair of pink fuzzy dice on the mirror. A 1965 Ford Mustang convertible.
What the 1965 Ford Mustang Actually Was
It arrived in April of 1964 and more or less invented a class of car. Small, cheap, good looking, and with an options list long enough that no two of them left the dealer the same. People call the early ones 1964 and a half, and enthusiasts will argue about it happily for an hour, but Ford titled every one of them as a 1965. This is a proper 65 by its face, the honeycomb grille with the running horse standing in a chrome corral and a plain bar out to each side.
What strikes me standing in front of a 1965 Ford Mustang is how small it is. Sixty years of cars getting fatter have happened since, and this thing is parked next to a modern sedan that towers over it. It is the size a car used to be.
Palomino Tan and a Wood Rim Wheel
With the top down you get the whole interior handed to you, which is not usually how it goes. Tan vinyl buckets, a console running back between them, and the flat sweep speedometer across the dash that Ford used for this year only before the round gauges arrived for 66. In the middle of the console is the chrome T handle for the Cruise-O-Matic, so this is a car built for going somewhere on a Sunday rather than for winning anything.
Somebody fitted a wood rim three spoke wheel, which was the upgrade everyone wanted then and still looks right now. The wire style covers on the whitewalls finish it. None of it is loud. The whole car is one deep colour and a lot of chrome, and it does not need anything else.
Pink Dice and Two Canadian Flags
Here is what I actually like. The dice are pink, not red. The flags are the little plastic kind you get at a hardware store in June. There is a 1965 topper on the plate and a MUSTANG frame around it. None of this is period correct and none of it is trying to be. It is a couple enjoying their car in a parking lot on a Monday evening, and it is a lot more honest than a car roped off behind stanchions.
An open car is harder to photograph than a closed one, because the interior is right there in every frame and it will fight the paint for attention. I mostly worked low and from the front, letting the fender line and the chrome carry it, and took the interior separately from up above so the tan and the burgundy each got their own frame.
This was Richmond Hill, a Toronto suburb at the north end of the GTA, on a Monday night when the plaza lot fills up with cars like this. I shot it on the Leica Q3 in hard evening sun, no flash, nothing arranged. There is another one from the same night here, and the rest of the work is in the projects.
Thanks for looking!
