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The Heights
Matthew Porter's Photographs of Flying Cars
ISBN: 9781597114578
(PB - E)
€
"I was inspired by the way a car can steal the show. Think of iconic car chases in films- it's often about spectacle, and has little to do with advancing a narrative. And that's the way I think of these cars, as dead-end technologies, but also as high-performance machines which, for their audience, sought to reflect the spirit and attitudes of their time." Matthew Porter
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.
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