The Showcase: Matthew Porter

“The Showcase” is a weekly publication featuring a photographer that has caught our eye here at The F STOP. I’ve asked Matthew Porter to answer a few questions about his clever series of flying car images. Thank you Gabriela Herman for curating this week’s feature.

Tell us about your flying car series, what was the intent behind this project?

I wanted to photograph late 60s, early 70s Muscle Cars. The trick was to treat them as fetish objects, without getting too bogged down in a documentary project. On one level these cars are a lot of fun—they provide gleeful interludes and shiny distractions from boring and derivative plot lines. On another level they carry some negative baggage—they use too much gas, go dangerously fast, and are often owned by people with different political sentiments than mine. Hollywood allows them to be fun and bold again, and hopefully so do these images.

What was your inspiration?

The way a car can steal the show—think of the iconic car chase in Bullitt. I think I’d been traveling around to car shows and hitting up strangers for posed pictures, making a lot of photographs that we’ve all seen a million times, then a string of shiny movies with muscle cars in them came out. I thought, this is what I want, cars in the air with lens flairs splashing over their hoods. Also, I’m interested in things at their developmental peak, just before they become dead end technology.

How did you create these images?

Model cars on a string, shot in a studio. Photoshop. I photographed everything with a 4×5. The backgrounds are San Francisco and Maine.

How have people responded to these images?
It’s hard to say. I think at this point in my career negative responses manifest in silence, so I just hear nothing. There have been some positives—I’m able to exhibit work a little more, and I’ve started working with some galleries. I’m basically a starving artist and I keep hoping that I can get more editorial and commercial work. Attitudes have changed however, and I’ve noticed more reluctance in the past few years to take chances with assignments. What I mean by that is that now I’m the photographer that takes pictures of cars, so I don’t get hired to take portraits.

Are you working on any new projects you’d like to mention?

I’ve been working on a project that involves cowboys and the Hindenburg. The work is on view right now at the Marty Walker Gallery in Dallas, and I’m working on producing more for a show this fall at M+B in LA.