For about a hundred years cars have been conquering our surroundings and landscape; today there are an estimated 600 to 800 million vehicles worldwide, and rising. Merja Salo's photo book Carscapes offers an open and sometimes skewed insight into our motorized environment. What do cities, rural areas and familiar places look like when the photographic gaze does not exclude cars or tolerate them as blind spots, but deliberately includes them — when cars become a constitutive part of a new landscape, a car-landscape? The car stands for speed and freedom; cars create what the philosopher Paul Virilio called “dromology,” the logic of speed. Acceleration characterizes the modern world, and vehicles are its symbols; cars necessitate roads and motorways and transform the land.