Kristin Bedford
Cruise Night will be available to purchase from Tuesday May 4, 2021. Since its beginnings in the 1940s, the prolific lowrider tradition has provided a platform for Mexican Americans to have a voice and be seen. Today there are tens of thousands of lowriders in Los Angeles, still, lowriding is often pigeonholed as craft or folk art and stereotyped as crude and dangerous. Through intimate and unstaged photography, Bedford reveals a different reality – a tradition of self-expression that is passed down between generations.
Bedford’s fascination with lowriding began when learning of the complex and sophisticated nuanced symbolism behind car customization. Cars became mobile canvases reflecting decades of identity politics and culture, allowing a platform for creativity. The legendary community embraced and welcomed Bedford over her five years of integrating and documenting their lifestyle, sharing traditions, attending hundreds of lowrider cruise nights, car shows, quinceañeras, weddings and funerals. Bedford’s photographs of women lowriders display them in their element without being positioned as accessories.
Cruise Night (Damiani) is a visual tribute to a prolific American cultural movement set against the Los Angeles cityscape. Seen through a rare and uniquely female vantage point, Bedford aims to overturn this cultural space traditionally defined by men. Cruise Night includes snippets of oral histories by members of the various clubs speaking about the culture and its impact on their lives. The reflective text on the book’s cover reflects the metallic sheen of the lowrider exterior detailing.
“Kristin Bedford appreciates the sensitivity of our culture and Cruise Night is an amazing representation of lowriding. We are always being stereotyped but by riding with us she understands what we are really about and what we do. She has earned the respect of the lowrider community by not just making a book but by living the life with us. We will always be thankful that she’s one of the very few that got it right. Like the saying goes, “one rides, we all ride” and she’s riding along with us.” –Juan Ramirez, Co-founder Los Angeles Lowrider Community and President of Just Memories Car Club Los Angeles, CA
Yahaira, Millenium Car Club, Los Angeles, CA, December 27, 2015
Los Angeles, Los Angeles Car Club, Hawaiian Gardens, CA, July 8, 2018
Interview by Dana Stirling
First, tell us a little about your journey with art and photography – how did it all start for you?
When I was five years old my father, who was a bohemian filmmaker and activist, gave me my first camera. I began taking photos at that point. I never had any formal training in photography but was exposed to incredible art and curation at a very early age. My father was poor and the Smithsonian museums were free, so he would take me each weekend to see incredible art. We would spend hours looking and this is what helped shape me. I was particularly struck by the stillness and quietude in James Whistler’s watercolors, and the paintings by Abbott Thayer, Thomas Dewing and Edward Hopper. I only began making photographs in color in 2012, and I think back to how paintings by Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis and Yves Klein were a large part of my formative years. Such filmmakers as Federico Fellini, Terrence Malick and Fritz Lang also influenced me in my youth.
Your new publication Cruise Night documents “Los Angeles Mexican American lowrider community throughout Southern California and Nevada from 2014 to 2019” as you mention in your artist statement. For readers that are perhaps less familiar or are not from the region or country, could you tell us about the lowrider community?
It is important to knowthat the term ‘lowrider’ has two meanings. It is both a customized car modified to allow the vehicle to ride close to the ground, and the driver of the car.
The common description of lowriding is ‘bajito y suavecito’which translates from the Spanish to ‘low and slow’. Unlike the hot rod movement,where the goal is to strip down a car and go fast, lowriding is about decorating a car and going slow to be seen on the boulevard.
A lowrider will often purchase an old car in poor condition. To anyone else it might look unrepairable. For a lowrider it is a tabula rasa, a blank slate, with which they can realize their dream. Every lowrider car is different and is an expression of the owner’spersonal vision. The cars are works of art, with each one representing an individual voice.
Luscious Illusion, New Class Car Club, Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles, CA, July 22, 2018
Kandy Lime, Klique Car Club, Barrio Logan, San Diego, CA, April 22, 2017
What draw you to this subject? What made you start this project and how did it evolve as the years went on?
Underlying all of my projects is an interest in social justice and how communities express their civil rights in a society that often marginalizes them. My path to lowriding came from an interest in how the customization of a car is about having a voice – politically, culturally and creatively. While lowriding is a worldwide phenomenon, for Mexican Americans in Los Angeles, it has a unique significance. For over seventy years, this community has been expressing their identity through this distinct car culture. I wanted to photograph and understand how transforming a car was integral to being seen and heard.
As you have been documenting this community for several years, have you seen a change as years progressed?
The lowriding community is prolific and only expanding. There are presently tens of thousands of lowriders in Los Angeles County alone. This does not take into consideration the large numbers in the rest of California and the Southwest. Everyday new people are customizing cars and starting their own car clubs.
It does seem that you have put an emphasis on the women in this community and you also do mention that it is not as common for a woman to photograph the scene – can you tell us about your experience and how people did in fact react to your presence there? How was your interaction with these women and did you feel that you had an impact on their lives in some way?
While my interest in communal self-expression is what brought me to lowriding, once I began making photographs of the movement, I had no agenda. My process is to completely turn myself over to the unknown. I am grounded in mystery and I let the photos reveal what the story is about. Over time, I noticed that many of the images featured women. It was completely organic that women are so prominent in Cruise Night.
For my entire career I have considered myself a “photographer”. During this project I realized for the first time that I was a “woman photographer”. When I saw the reverent, quiet and natural photos of women lowriders I made, I discerned that it was a woman connecting with other women who made them. I also reflected on why I had not seen images like this before and it became clear to me that the visual narrative of lowriding, and automotive cultures of all types, has been entirely shaped by men. The male-dominated imagery usually portrays women as sexual accessories who pose in bathing suits or lingerie alongside a car. I feel it took a woman photographer to break through this mold and offer a new story.
Gypsy Rose, Imperials Car Club, Hawaiian Gardens, CA, July 12, 2015
Samantha, At It Again Car Club, Elysian Park, Los Angeles, CA, May 7, 2017
The project has a really great sense of color and it seems that through out the work, you play with color and use it as part of your composition. Can you tell us a little about this notion in your work?
All of my photographs are selected from a deeply intuitive place so there is no rationale for the use of particular colors or compositions in Cruise Night.
How involved are you, or were you, in the community? It seems from the photos that you had an intimate connection to these peoples and that you were very much a part of the scene and not only a fly on the wall. It really feels that they seem comfortable around you and that you had access to really great moments with them.
Since completing Cruise Night, I remain involved with the Mexican American lowriding community in Los Angeles. I regularly attend cruise nights and spend time with friends I have made in the lowriding family.
Anthony “Too Tall”, Ordinary Life Car Club, Paramount, CA, December 27, 2014
Whittier Boulevard, Heatwave Car Club, East Los Angeles, CA, September 3, 2016
How was the process of making this book? Can you talk about your editing and sequencing decisions that probably were hard after 5 years of photographing!
While I make the photographs in community, the rest of my process happens in isolation. I return to my art studio and quietly review the images. I am only interested in photographs that move me, and my selection process is entirely intuitive. Once I come across an image that speaks to me, I print it and place it on one of the long tables in my studio. Over time the tables slowly fill up with these photographs. I don’t show the work to others, as the process is deeply personal. I patiently watch to see how the photos talk to each other, and for years I cannot know what the end story will be. The entire photo selection, editing and sequencing process happens alone.
If there was one story you wanted to share for a specific image – which would it be and why?
In the photo titled No Soy de Ti / I Don’t Belong to You, you see Mary in the back seat of her 1952 Chevy with the wind blowing in her hair and she moves to keep it off her face. When I look at this image, she appears to me as a divine, heavenly figure. There is a sense of being part of an inner landscape and transcendence. There is also the clear and very important message of her independence and defining herself as her own woman – romantically, as a lowrider, and in greater society.
No Soy De Ti / I Don’t Belong To You, Vintage Ladies Car Club, Whittier, CA, June 22, 2018
Do you have any advice for artists and young photographers reading this that might be interested in starting a documentary style project such as yours? What are some important things they should know or remember?
The most important thing when starting any documentary project is to question who you are, what are your values, how do you want to be treated in the world, and how do you want to treat others. In this day and age with the availability of digital and phone cameras, anyone can take a picture, but to tell a story and to do it with integrity that is special.
Finally, I’d be interested to hear, what would be next? Are you working on any other projects you can share with us? Any upcoming shows or events our readers can pin in their calendars?
I am working on four new projects: I am exploring my paternal heritage as a direct descendant of the 19thcentury utopian society, the Oneida Community, in upstate New York; exploring my maternal heritage with the Methodist-founded town, Ocean Gove, in New Jersey; doing street photography in my Los Angeles neighborhood of Koreatown; and doing a book titled Recuerdosthat solely features the archival lowrider photographs that people have shared with me over the last six years.
Lupita, Highclass Car Club, Cypress Park, Los Angeles, CA, June 13, 2015
Kandy Lavender & Magenta, Barrio Logan, San Diego, CA, April 22, 2017
Yvette, East Los Angeles Car Club, City of Industry, CA, August 14, 2015
