Spencer Ostrander

Spencer Ostrander's (born 1984) visual study of ruined car bodies began in 2023 when he was driving his father-in-law, Paul Auster, from Park Slope to the Upper East Side and back again, over a period of five weeks, for radiation treatment. He passed the impounded vehicles outside Brooklyn's 90th Street Police Precinct without giving them much notice. Then, one day, he saw them as if for the first time, and a project was born. The resulting photographs are haunting documents of collision and the mangled remains of unknown human stories. They bear mute witness to the drivers and passengers—the flesh and blood missing from the pictures.

New York–based photographer Spencer Ostrander (born 1984) presents a series of photographs from one of his early visits to Times Square, in which he was caught off guard by a sudden rainfall. The people in the crowd, draped in plastic, are transformed into abstract, brilliant reflections of the massive advertising that surrounded them. Designed to entrap the consumer with illusions of status, the good life and happiness by product, the vast LED light boards turned visitors into walking ads for MTV, Coca-Cola and The Lion King. When the flickering LEDs hit his camera’s sensor, they created unseen lines and streaks of color, a technical mirage that perfectly suits Ostrander’s subject—the empty allure of late capitalism. Moving among the people with his camera, Ostrander began to see sorrow, tenderness, despair—a hidden story that reveals itself through his photographs.