The Heights: Matthew Porter’s Photographs of Flying Cars

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. Rachel Kushner contributes an original piece of writing that riffs on the aesthetic and aspirational nature of the American car.