Cruising in the sunset

The beautifully reproduced photos in Kristin Bedford's book capture the flavour of the lowrider scene in LA between 2014 and 2019. Teen and young adult Mexican Americans love to drive around their communities in these heavily customised cars, mostly several years old but in the photos they look almost new because of the time their owners devote to the flamboyant spray jobs and sparkling chrome.

Bedford wanted to show the lowrider community as much as the cars so there are only a few photos showing a complete vehicle but plenty of close-ups revealing colourful interiors and decorative paint on the outside. The portraits are a mix of the owners sitting in their cars or elsewhere, photo forty taken in 2018, has a man (the groom?) at a wedding with dollars tucked into his braces, photo seventy is from a funeral in 2017 with four men and a teen, dressed in casual black and looking sternly at the camera. The ladies in these photos are strong on make-up and dressed for their next cruise night.

It's worth commenting on the book's excellent production. It's twelve inches square with the title and author debossed on the cover. The seventy-five photos are printed with a 250 screen on gorgeous matt art paper. Oddly there are no page numbers, only the photos are numbered which makes the captions, on four pages at the back of the book, difficult to tie in with their photo.

This book is rubbish

Don't let my headline put you off buying this book because this is fascinating printed rubbish, the sort of thing that any graphic artist or designer will be interested in. Others would throw all this away after its fulfilled its use, who wants to keep a soap powder box, chewing gum wrapper, or a milk bottle top. Page 348 shows fifteen soap powder boxes and now they look visually interesting, I started to compare the type, colors and the design of each packet. You can't get more down-market than wrestling posters but here's a spread of eight on pages thirty-eight and nine revealing various wood and lead set type in black, red and green with photos crammed into each poster. By themselves, they are not worth a second glance (except to a designer, maybe).

The book is not quite a unique look at throwaway culture, Marilyn Karp edited 'In flagrante collecto' in 2006, full of printed ephemera collections like crayon boxes, seed packets, cigar bands, airline safety cards but also physical objects like wire coat hangers, robots or car-fresheners and all shown in a more structured way than the ephemera snapshot style of Andy Altmann's book.

The pages in 'Tat' look as exuberant as some of the contents. Huge enlargements of fairly small printed items reveal the coarse screens and out-of-register printing that adds their visual charm. In fact, most of the book are blow-ups of tacky printing. There are interesting little bits of the author's early and teen years scattered through the four hundred illustrations which give all the material a nice personal touch.

Well worth getting if you work in the graphic arts, a design studio, or just started in design.