Cruise Night

Known for her understated portraits of American cultural movements, Kristin Bedford’s new work, Cruise Night, is an intimate, unstaged exploration of Mexican-American lowrider car culture in Los Angeles. From 2014 to 2019, she attended hundreds of lowrider cruise nights, car shows, quinceañeras, weddings and funerals. Bedford’s images offer a new visual narrative around the lowrider tradition and invite us to question widespread social stereotypes.

Situated at the intersection of aesthetics and social realism, her photographs explore the nuance of cars as moving canvases and the legendary community that creates them. With the bold language of colour photography and the female point of view, Cruise Night is an original look at a prolific American movement in the Los Angeles urban landscape.

“It’s not often that a woman creates a body of work around lowriding. Since the advent of the automobile, car culture in all its forms has been dominated by the male perspective. Making images as a woman in a space traditionally defined by men, and of a practice traditionally used to represent masculinity, places my work in tension with dominant representations of lowriding. ”

Lowrider: A custom car modified to allow the vehicle to ride close to the ground.