Los Angeles-based photographer, Clint Woodside has released his first monograph published by Kill Your Idols.
This 68 paged hardcover book printed in an edition of 500 is a collection and photographic study of covered cars found around the Southern California area. You can pick up a copy at Dead Beat Club now.
"What strikes me now, looking at this fresh new edit, is not the boring ubiquity of the subject matter – the deadpan Christo-like charm of all these tarps attached to all these automobiles (“hey, instant conceptual art!”) – but the manmade environments Woodside is showing us in the photographs, and the sense of walking-and-looking that the series implies. Never mind the covered cars; look at what surrounds them. the photos – mostly off hand, in various analog formats – are oddly alive with endearing residential architecture and everyday human habitation/habit (well-worn apartments and houses, painted garage doors, oil-stained driveways), and the familiar flora of Southern California (looming, disheveled palms; massive weird shrubs; dense, dark ficus trees; unruly ivy). The word “undercover” is especially apt here too, not only because “Clint Woodside” sounds like a character out of a classic LA film noir, but also because – in a strange twist – while the recurring subject of these pictures is “cars” (a quintessentially LA theme), the real subject remains hidden in plain sight: the intimate, everyday human narratives swirling around the cars. Woodside is just gathering evidence. As a series, Woodside’s “undercover cars” loosely documents a place and a time but they’re also a record of his photographic obsession, a long-term attachment to a simple theme from which more complex themes can emerge and evolve.” – Mike Slack
