He began his love of art as a graffiti artist, but graffiti can be fleeting. To lend permanence to his spray-painted works, Marion decided to photograph them; these pictures he could keep forever.

The artist continued photographing street art, even after moving to London. While there, he broadened his list of subjects to include people and architecture. Upon his return to France, Marion decided to fine-tune his photographic competencies at Parisian photography school EFET.

Taking cues from his childhood imaginings and inspired by science fiction films and artists, Marion depicts his vision of futuristic transportation of wheel-less cars serenely suspended above the ground. But he has included a neat twist: While the vehicles’ levitation most definitely smacks of sci-fi, the cars are in fact modified vintage classics, including Chevrolets, Mercedes, Jaguars, Aston Martins and Porsches.

The images that emerge are a throwback blend of retro style with futuristic imaginings. Iconic cars from the glory days of automobile production are transformed into airborne transport, catapulting their vintage design into a visionary age. The pictures are really quite surreal.

Growing up in the 1980s, Marion thought that by the year 2000 everyone would be piloting flying cars, like the landspeeder from Star Wars or the futuristic soaring machines from French artist, Moebius. Marion’s dream of one day propelling a floating vehicle has not yet become reality but in this series, the 39-year-old has brought to life the ‘hover’ vehicles of his childhood fantasies.

Capturing the idea in his head of what constitutes a “flying car” and making it palpable required a two-step “manufacturing” process. The first step involved finding the subjects of the shoot and identifying the locations; the second involved the equipment.

“For the first part of the series photographed in Geneva, I chose the cars simply by walking down the street. I looked for cars parked on the side of the road as I wanted to use real size models instead of miniatures,” he says.

Marion chose to shoot classic automobiles because they most closely resembled his childhood idea of what a flying car should look like. The first vehicles he photographed included a Chevrolet El Camino, Mercedes 300 SL Roadster and Jaguar XK120.

Finding the appropriate environment in which to shoot the autos meant seeking out spaces devoid of people and recognizable buildings. The venerable cars take centre stage against backgrounds of mid-20th century architecture in varying textures and muted or neutral colours.

“I looked for architecture dating from the 1970s; for me that’s retro-futuristic. The buildings had to be imposing, massive and graphic.”

To achieve the look of “flying” cars, Marion had to apply a digital assembly technique to remove the tyres and wheel wells from the classic beauties and merge the cars onto different backgrounds, eventually settling on the right scene for each futuristic portrayal.