Here, Bedford talks to us about how she became interested in lowriding culture, how she gains the trust of her subjects, and the unique perspective she brings to a project, as an outsider.
This spring she released the intimate and unstaged photos as a book called Cruise Night (available now here and here). She started shooting in 2014 and continued to work on the project until 2019. It may seem like an unlikely path, but as Bedford sees it the ideas that Salazar stood for are omnipresent in the lowriding culture today. Bedford’s interest in lowriding culture started from an interest in the politics of Ruben Salazar, a Mexican American journalist and civil rights activist who was killed in 1970. "The underlying theme of all of my projects is an interest in social justice and how communities express their civil rights in a society that often marginalizes them," she says of her work. I wanted to photograph and understand how transforming a car was integral to being seen and heard"
"For 70 years, members of the Mexican American community have been expressing their identity through car culture. in East Los Angeles to document the lowrider car community there. Her style of long-term storytelling has taken her to live among a deeply religious community in Philadelphia, explore storefront churches in the South, and most recently to Whittier Blvd. Kristin Bedford isn’t afraid to commit to a project. The cover of 'Cruise Night,' available now.
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