“The parked car versus the midair car is object instead of subject. A car flying through an intersection is the protagonist; that’s clear. It knows the story and it is the story, even if the casual grace of electric wires, light poles, and traffic signals play their parts.”

 

 —Rachel Kushner

 

Matthew Porter presents a portfolio of twenty-five images of vintage 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 photographs, known popularly as the “flying car” series, 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.