Kristin Bedford
As her new book is released, the documentary photographer talks to Alistair Campbell about exploring communities and letting your subjects guide what you photograph
Kristin Bedford’s work explores the idea of community and the cultures that arise as people work, play and pray together. She specialises in long-term projects, including living with a religious community in Philadelphia and documenting the ‘storefront churches’ of the southern United States. Bedford’s new book,
Cruise Night, compiles the best photos she took as she explored Mexican American lowrider (custom-car owner) culture in Los Angeles over five years.
How did you end up becoming involved with the lowriders of LA?
Underlying all of my projects is an interest in social justice and how communities express their civil rights in a society that often marginalises them. My path to lowriding came from an interest in how the customisation of a car is about having a voice – politically, culturally and creatively.
While lowriding is a worldwide phenomenon, for Mexican Americans in Los Angeles, it has a unique significance. For over 70 years, this community has been
expressing its identity through this distinct car culture. I wanted to photograph them, and to understand how transforming a car was integral to being seen and heard. How do you approach photographing what is essentially two different genres of photography – people and automotive – in one go?
Cruise Night is deeply personal, and reflects my practice of making images filled with quietude and stillness. This disposition is reflected in the intimate photos of both the details of car customisation and of the lowrider community. There are very few photographs featuring an entire car or a crowd of people. I found that closeness to the movement, both material and relational, is where I found my voice. It was never a matter of combining automotive and people genres, but always an expression of what I experienced. Were there any technical difficulties to overcome, like shooting in low light?
Initially I had to overcome the challenges of making photographs at night of shiny metal objects,
“I don’t place constraints on how long a project should take. I want the story to play out naturally”
both parked and in motion. For this project I bought a camera body that had a larger sensor. However, this alone was not enough.
Since I don’t ever introduce my own lighting source, I found how to best illuminate the cars with what the landscape provided. I learned which corners on the popular boulevards had the brightest streetlights, and I would use them to light the cars as they went by. I also learned that headlights and interior car lights would be of assistance. You will see a lot of photos in Cruise Night lit by the cars themselves. Is there a perfect lens to shoot this style of work on, or does it require a selection?
When I think about photographing a community of people, I treat them as I would like to be treated.
I only use available light, no strobes or flashes. All of the photos are unstaged, with no posing or created environments. I use a fixed lens, which means the distance I appear to be from the subject is the actual distance. If you see a photograph from inside a car, it exists because I was invited to be there.
The most important things to me are trust and having a relationship with people. Once there is kinship and understanding, I can make the kind of images I am drawn to. The culture of the zoom lens when photographing communities is disturbing, as it enables a kind of voyeurism and detachment. The language of the fixed lens tells the story of a relationship. What have you learnt from your past projects that you have brought to this one?
The main thing I brought to Cruise Night from past projects is an understanding of expectations. I don’t place any constraints on how long a project should take. I want the story to play out naturally. If I have a timetable, I don’t think I can make something new or honest. So many of the images are extremely ‘clean’ looking. Is this just a part of being shot in LA, or this happen in post-production?
When a lowrider prepares their car to go to a cruise night or a car show, they have spent months, maybe years, getting it ready to be seen. Immediately before an event, they may spend a couple days buffing and cleaning the car. The goal is to show your best. It is a work of art, and you want it to shine. When you see a clean image of an automobile, it is because that is what the owner intended you to see.
The quality of light in Los Angeles also plays a large role. Many of the photos in the book were taken in the golden hour, where Los Angeles light is exhibited in all of its glory. This factor contributes to the natural glow and smoothness of the images.
For my entire career I have considered myself ‘a photographer’. During this project, I realised for the first time that I was ‘a woman photographer’. When I saw the reverent, quiet and natural photos of women lowriders I made, I discerned that it was a woman connecting with other women who made them.
I also reflected on why I had not seen images like this before, and it became clear to me that the visual narrative of lowriding, and automotive cultures of all types, has been entirely shaped by men. The maledominated imagery usually portrays women as sexual accessories, who pose in bathing suits or lingerie alongside a car. Maybe it took a woman photographer to break through this mould.
While my interest in communal self-expression is what brought me to lowriding, once I began making photographs of the movement, I had no agenda. My process is to completely turn myself over to the unknown. I am grounded in mystery, and
I let the photos reveal what the story is about. Do you have an end vision for the project before you begin, or does it happen along the way as you shoot more images? What’s your selection process for choosing your best images? What was it like being a female photographer among lowriders, which is historically considered quite a male-dominated culture? And are things changing – it becoming less of a male preserve?
While I make the photographs in community, the rest of my process happens in isolation. I return to my art studio and quietly review the images.
I am only interested in photographs that move me, and my selection process is entirely intuitive.
Once I come across an image that speaks to me, I print it and place it on one of the long tables in
“My process is to turn myself over to the unknown. I am grounded in mystery”
my studio. Over time, the tables slowly fill up with these photographs. I never have a plan about where a story should go. I don’t show the work to others, as the process is personal. I patiently watch to see how the photos talk to each other, and for years I cannot know what the end story will be. What advice would you give someone who wanted to start up their own passion project?
The most important thing when starting any project is to question who you are, what your values are, how you want to be treated in the world, and how you want to treat others. In this day and age, with the availability of digital and phone cameras, anyone can take a picture – but to tell a story and to do it with integrity is special. What would be a dream project to create, and do you have any new adventures coming up?
My next project is about a 19th-century perfectionist religious communal society called the Oneida Community that existed from 1848-1881. The Community had many experimental elements, and I hope to focus on the radical role of women. It will be a multi-tiered project that includes my photographs of the remnants of the Community’s architecture and ephemera, archival photos of the members, and my own family photographs, as I am a direct descendant.
This will be the first time I include my own history in a project. While I have these ideas at the
outset, once I begin this project, the story could lead in a totally different direction. I am open to seeing what happens. What tips can you give to someone looking to get their work published?
I feel the key to any project is viewing it as a story. If you want to have your project published, edit the images to read as a narrative. A story can be told with any style of photography, be it landscape, portraiture or street photography. While there are traditional constructs for storytelling, you can experiment with new formats, but there should be a thread that guides the viewer. What makes for good consistency across an entire portfolio of images?
A rigorous edit of one’s work is critical. It is important to let go of photographs that you like or feel emotionally attached to if they don’t contribute to the bigger picture. After this editing occurs, the sequence will fall into place, as you are working with your strongest images. As you’ve built up so much experience as a photographer through the variety of your projects, what would you say is the best thing you have ever learned?
There is no one formula to take to every project. Whether it is reassessing the equipment I am using or accepting the lighting constraints of a new environment, it is important to constantly adapt, and not to force an agenda.
For my series Be Still, which takes place at a small storefront church, there was one window that was the sole source of natural light. There were a few dim artificial lights on the ceiling, but they contributed very little. In my early days of photographing the church community, I saw that many images had overexposed backgrounds because of the uncovered window and the direction it faced. While others might say you need to show all the details in a space and that such overexposure is not technically correct, I embraced it. I accepted that the light was blasting throughout the small room, and that the background was often obscured.
In the end, the light became its own character, and was a defining part of the work. I am grateful I did not try to balance out the exposures for any sort of technical norm, but rather let the space guide the work.