A Change Of Gear

Drunk driving is a serious problem in England -- even more so over the Christmas period. J Walter Thompson, London, created a stark, harrowing and highly original anti-drunk-driving campaign aimed specifically at the potential car buyer. The ads are placed in the used car pages of a popular listings magazine.

Instead of photographs of the car for sale, there are three ads showing separate body parts: lungs, heart and a kidney. The copy next to the images is a parody of a used car sales pitch. For example, next to the photograph of a kidney, it says: "Dark brown, 12 years old. Superb example. Well looked after. One owner from new. Slight damage to bodywork. Previous owner killed by drink-driver."

The ads were conceived by the creative team of art director/copywriter Matt Collier and Wayne Robinson, photographed by still-life specialist Conor Masterson and the client is the listings magazine Exchange & Mart. The organs are not human, but actually belonged to pigs. They were picked out by the photographer and Collier at the famous Smithfields meat market in the City of London.

Once he got the assignment, Masterson spent a few weeks looking at various medical textbooks and talking to butchers before concluding that pigs' organs most resemble human anatomy.

"We went up to the market at 5am," says Collier. "Some butchers brought out some organs and it was exactly the same look that we had seen in the medical textbooks. One of the traders we talked to actually has pig's valves [transplanted] in his body--so they are that good a human representation,"

After buying ten of each organ--30 pounds of meat in total--the team took them all back to the studio, laid all the organs out on a table and chose the one which was most intact. If you still have the stomach to read on, you might want to know that all animal organs are cut up for any signs of disease.

Once the selection was made, the shoot was a relatively straightforward overhead still-life shot: "The idea with the background is to make it look as much as possible like a morgue and really hard hitting. We did want any distractions, just very gritty and basically like a medical shot," adds Colllier.