"Cruise Night is a collection of unstaged photographs and recorded oral history that I made with the Los Angeles Mexican American lowrider community throughout Southern California and Nevada from 2014 to 2019. My path to lowriding originates from my interest in the layered and nuanced ways that customizing a car reflects decades of political, cultural and creative self-expression in this community. Over the five years of making these photographs the lowrider family shared the sophistication and complexity of their tradition with me. Since its beginnings in the 1940s, the lowrider tradition provided a platform for Mexican Americans to have a voice and be seen. Today there are tens of thousands of lowriders in Los Angeles. The movement is prolific, yet it maintains an element of invisibility in greater society. Lowriding is often pigeonholed as simplistic folk art and stereotyped by the media as crude and dangerous. I have seen a different reality – a refined and beautiful tradition of self-expression that is passed down between generations."
Kristin Bedford
Located at the intersection of aesthetics and social realism, Kristin Bedford’s photography explores race, visual stereotypes and communal self-expression. Through long-term engagement with communities, Bedford makes photographs that invite us to reconsider prevalent visual narratives around cultural and spiritual movements. Bedford’s photographs have appeared in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe and are held in numerous private and public collections worldwide, including the Library of Congress and the Archive of Documentary Arts at the Rubenstein Library.
Founded in 2000 in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Galerie Catherine et André Hug has chosen photography to explore the medium's mode of expression. The gallery selects classic documentary artists, or those who prefer a fictional form, whose work questions reality, the narrative potential of the image, or the exploration of the dream that inhabits man.