Cruise Night

Cruise Night, a bestselling photo-book in 2021, sold out in the USA in four weeks. It was featured in over sixty news outlets, including The Guardian, Smithsonian Magazine, CNN, British Journal of Photography, Aesthetica Magazine, The Telegraph, The Royal Photographic Society Journal, POLKA Magazine and The Brooklyn Rail.

Scenes from the Mexican American lowrider life: a clothbound photobook documenting a vibrant LA car culture.

Known for her quiet portraits of American cultural movements, Kristin Bedford’s work, Cruise Night, is an intimate and unstaged exploration of Mexican American lowrider car culture in Los Angeles.

From 2014 to 2019 she attended hundreds of lowrider cruise nights, car shows, quinceañeras, weddings and funerals. Bedford’s images offer a new visual narrative around the lowrider tradition and invite us to question prevalent societal stereotypes. Located at the intersection of aesthetics and social realism, her photographs explore the nuance of cars as mobile canvases and the legendary community that creates them.

With the bold language of color photography and the female vantage point, Cruise Night is an original look at a prolific American movement set against the Los Angeles cityscape.