Spencer Ostrander: Wreckage - (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Vivid and visceral, Ostrander's images of wrecked cars evoke the ghosts of human presences and the strangeness of mortality itself

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.