Kristin Bedford: Cruise Night

Co-founder Los Angeles Lowrider Community and President of Just Memories Car Club

Juan Ramirez

Kristin Bedford appreciates the sensitivity of our culture and Cruise Night is an amazing representation of lowriding. We are always being stereotyped but by riding with us she understands what we are really about and what we do. She has earned the respect of the lowrider community by not just making a book but by living the life with us. We will always be thankful that she’s one of the very few that got it right. Like the saying goes, “one rides, we all ride” and she’s riding along with us.

Curator, Wallis Annenberg Photography Department Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Eve Schillo

One part family album in its prosaic depiction of the lowrider community, one part a poetic, electric, color filled photographic embrace of an often stereotyped subculture, Bedford's approach in Cruise Night captivates with its uniquely female gaze, a rarity in car culture across genres.

Royal Photographic Society Journal

Los Angeles-based documentary photographer Kristin Bedford spent five years living with and observing the lowriding communities of LA. The result is a photobook infused with colour that gets behind the stereotypes of a testosterone-fuelled culture.... a joyful visual tribute to lowriding.

The Guardian

Kristin Bedford set out to chronicle LA’s Mexican-American lowrider community, who drive customised cars with a lowered body. She discovered that each vehicle was a marvel of defiance and self-expression.

AnOther

Dominique Sisley

In Cruise Night, Bedford focuses mostly on women. After all, lowriding – and car culture more generally – tends to be associated with machismo, with male image-makers and subjects dominating the narrative. On the rare occasions that lowrider women are portrayed in popular culture, they are presented as cartoonish, sexual accessories to men. But in fact, Bedford argues, they’re “an integral component” to the wider movement.

Airmail

Julia Vitale

Cruise Night is a visual tribute to the generations-old L.A. Mexican-American lowrider car community and the vehicles that fuel it. “It’s colorful. It’s shiny,” says Bomb Life Car Club’s Tommy Brizuela of the lowrider. “It’s full of gleam and glamour, and it’s like rolling out the red carpet in Hollywood on a Sunday night and showing your best.”

Girl Talk HQ

Today there are tens of thousands of lowriders in Los Angeles, still, lowriding is often pigeonholed as craft or folk art and stereotyped as crude and dangerous. Through intimate and unstaged photography, Kristin reveals a different reality – a tradition of self-expression that is passed down between generations.

Hypebae

Alexandra Pauly

‘Cruise Night’ spotlights women lowriders and the rich history of car customization.

ArtDaily

Bedford’s fascination with lowriding began when learning of the complex and sophisticated nuanced symbolism behind car customization. Cars became mobile canvases reflecting decades of identity politics and culture, allowing a platform for creativity. The legendary community embraced and welcomed Bedford over her five years of integrating and documenting their lifestyle, sharing traditions, attending hundreds of lowrider cruise nights, car shows, quinceañeras, weddings and funerals.

Metal Magazine

Romina Román

A a striking photo book that radiates warmth and a unique female perspective. The project takes us behind the curtain of this misunderstood subculture.

Smithsonian

Nili Blanck

A series of photos that, like the cars themselves, tell a visual story of how lowriders—the term refers to both the cars and their owners—have used customization as a means of resisting a homogenizing American society that too often suppresses the creativity and pride of its [marginalized people].

Hyperallergic

Lauren Moya Ford

Bedford’s book keeps the lowrider community at its visual and conceptual center. While her crisp, sharply composed photos sensually celebrate these exquisite cars and their dedicated drivers, snippets of oral histories by lowriding club members throughout the book grant essential insight into the lives and experiences of this unique community.

CNN Style

Jacqui Palumbo

A compendium of the vibrant velvet and leather interiors, wire wheels and dazzling paint jobs that make up the cars of the Mexican American lowriding community, bathed in Los Angeles' idiosyncratic golden hours or the artificial glow of ambient light at night.

Flaunt

Constanza Falco Raez

Taking us behind the curtain of this misunderstood community, the photo book explores the art and symbolism of the Latinx Lowrider Car Culture, as well as the strength of its female members [...] Developed over five years and finally out now, Bedford integrated herself into the LA’s lowrider world, creating a visual tribute of the same with snippets of oral histories by members of the various clubs speaking about the culture and its impact on their lives.

Smithsonian

Jeff Campagna

Bedford emphasizes the tradition, self-expression and artistic aspects of lowriding, bringing a female point of view to car culture.