The Heights

(27.3 x 30.5 cm)  56 pages, 25 four-color images.
Paperback with jacket

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.

Matthew Porter (born in State College, Pennsylvania, 1975) is a graduate of Bard College and of the ICP-Bard MFA Program in Advanced Photographic Studies, New York. His work was included in Photography Is Magic (Aperture, 2015), and his first book, Archipelago, was published in 2015. Porter’s work is represented by M+B, Los Angeles; Invisible-Exports, New York; and Xippas Gallery, Paris. He lives in Brooklyn.

Rachel Kushner’s novel The Mars Room was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize, won the Prix Médicis étranger, was a New York Times bestseller, and is being translated into more than twenty languages. Her previous novels, The Flamethrowers (2013) and Telex from Cuba (2008), were both finalists for the National Book Award. Kushner lives in Los Angeles.