CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/20/2017

Langdon Clay's Parade of Parked Cars in NY in the Magic Years 1974-1976

Is it the cars, or the backdrop of unstyled, nocturnal New York in the 1970s that makes this book so cool, so lonely feeling? More than 100 eerie, unpopulated photographs of parked cars are "arrayed like mugshots but lit like Hollywood stars," Luc Sante writes in the Foreword. "They rule the night, those Pintos and Chargers and Gremlins and Checkers and Galaxie 500s and Fairlanes and Sables and Rivieras and LeSabres and Eldorados. They unashamedly flaunt their dents, their rust spots, their mismatched doors, their liberal applications of Bondo, their repairs effected with masking tape—but then some of them revel in butch-wax jobs like you don't see anymore, gleaming like the twilight's last sigh." Featured image is "Rose Jewelers car, Ford Galaxie 500 XL (1966), Troy, NY," 1975.