Forms of Resistance: Cruise Night feature for Aesthetica

Kristin Bedford can’t pinpoint the exact moment she first saw a lowrider. In Los Angeles, they’re everywhere. Driven close the ground, immaculately restored and creatively customised, with their distinctive rims and glistening candy paint jobs, these eye-catching classic cars are “part of the fabric of the city,” says the photographer, whose new book, Cruise Night, provides a uniquely meditative and reverent take on lowriding culture amongst Mexican Americans in LA.

Kristin Bedford, Gypsy Rose, Imperials Car Club, July 12, 2015 (detail). Courtesy of the artist.

Unlike other portrayals of the scene, which tend to highlight the style and swagger of young, male lowriders, Bedford’s presents lowriding as a community – multigenerational, female as well as male – and a fine art practice, alternating intimate portraits with close-up compositions of car bodies.

Lowriding is a global phenomenon, popularised through 1990s Hip Hop videos and, more recently, Instagram. You’ll find lowriders – a term which refers both to the vehicle and the driver – in Brazil, Indonesia and Japan. But lowriding’s birthplace is LA, where it originated after WWII in the 1940s and 1950s when young Mexican Americans started modifying their cars by lowering the suspension and embellishing the exteriors with colourful designs, cruising around to dis- play their handiwork. 1958 saw the government crack down, banning vehicles with any parts lower than their wheel rims, but the well-known lowrider Ron Aguirre responded the following year with his X-Sonic car, containing a pioneering hydraulic system allowing the front of the vehicle to be raised and lowered in a bouncing motion – a technology that has since become a defining feature of all 21st century lowriders…