The Military Vehicle Technology Foundation collection is a little known museum, nestled in the hills above Silicon Valley. At it’s peak there were over 200 perfectly restored and one-of-a-kind military vehicles there. The prize of the collection was the fully restored German WWII Panther tank, one of only 5 operational examples left, it’s considered the best surviving example in the world.
I asked for permission to night shoot some of the collection, and was granted access a couple of times in the winter of 2010/11. Management seemed really excited about the potential uses of my photography for promotion, posters, calendars, etc. Unfortunately, the museum’s founder, Jaques Littlefield, died in 2009, so by the time I was shooting, the future of the collection was already in doubt. Once I was done, no one at the museum showed interest in the pictures, and almost all of these images sat unseen on my hard drive. Until now.
The best and rarest of the vehicles you see here will be moved to the Collings Foundation museum on the East Coast, and the rest of the collection is scheduled to be auctioned off in the summer of 2014. By the end of the year, everything will probably be gone.
