Thanks to Stephen Hendrickson for the heads-up on Kristin Bedford's Cruise Night, a stunning look at another LA car culture. The book includes a collection of archival photos from LA's Mexican American lowriderccommunity and documents the contemporary scene as well.
From Jacqui Palumbo's piece on CNN: "In the back of a 1952 Chevy Deluxe, a woman brushes back her hair, her heavily lined eyes closed in a moment of quiet, the words "No Soy De Ti" ("I don't belong to you") inked across her chest. Mary is a member of the Vintage Ladies Car Club, a Chicana lowriding community based in Los Angeles County, and she's one of the many lowriders photographer Kristin Bedford features in her five-year body of work "Cruise Night," which portrays the interiority of both her subjects and their cars.
"Cruise Night," recently published as a book, is a compendium of the vibrant velvet and leather interiors, wire wheels and dazzling paint jobs that make up the cars of the Mexican American lowriding community, bathed in Los Angeles' idiosyncratic golden hours or the artificial glow of ambient light at night."
"Lowriding took root in Los Angeles during the 1940s and is often traced back to the countercultural "pachucos" -- Chicano youths in colorful high-waisted, wide-legged and padded zoot suits who faced violence in the racial unrest that shook the city during World War II. Early drivers lowered their cars inches from the ground -- often with the help of a few well-placed sandbags -- and cruised them slow through the city streets; they were the opposite of the speedy and popular hot rod."
Autoliterate has posted on "The High Art of Riding Low: Ranflas, Corazón e Inspiración" at LA's Peterson Automotive Museum in 2017.
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