Matthew Porter presents a portfolio of twenty-five images of old-school cars, captured in midair as they careen over city streets and highway intersections.
Each photograph is a freeze-frame-a hypothetical film still from a pulp-fiction chase scene. The series seems, on one hand, to distill the essence of muscle-car Americana, a pop-cultural semaphore for the high-testosterone male persona.
And yet, on the other, the subject-the "all-American" muscle car as antihero-is caught in an eternal state of suspended animation, while the various elements of the landscape in the background organize themselves around the edges of the frame.
The resulting pictures are a hybrid of hyperreality and studied, topographic description, part bittersweet nostalgia and part ironic reinvention of a classic American trope. Rachel Kushner contributes an original piece of writing that riffs on the aesthetic and aspirational nature of the American car.
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