Located at the intersection of aesthetics and social realism, Kristin Bedford’s photography explores race, visual stereotypes and communal self-expression. Through long-term engagement with communities, Bedford makes photographs that invite us to reconsider prevalent visual narratives around cultural and spiritual movements.
Bedford’s monograph Cruise Night (Damiani, 2021), an exploration of the Mexican American lowrider community in Los Angeles, was a best-selling photography book in the USA the year of its release. Her photographs have appeared in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe and are held in numerous private and public collections worldwide, including LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), the Library of Congress and the Archive of Documentary Arts at the Rubenstein Library.
Bedford has given talks internationally about her projects, including presentations at the Chicago Humanities Festival, Photo Days Paris, Parsons School of Design, Photo Saint-Germain, Pop-Up Magazine and on numerous National Public Radio broadcasts. Her work has been featured in leading publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, Smithsonian Magazine, The Royal Photographic Society Journal, Aesthetica Magazine, The Telegraph, CNN, Esquire, POLKA Magazine and The Huffington Post.
Bedford holds a B.A. from George Washington University, an M.A. from Duke University and an A.A. from The Fashion Institute of Technology. Born in Washington, D.C., she lives and works in Los Angeles.
"The quiet and tender world of private and reclusive cultures, where words are rare, has produced for Kristin Bedford an opportunity to use her sensibility in the gentlest of manners, with an eloquent respect, to make exceptionally strong and moving photographs. To be patient is not easy in our world of bombast and sensation. Even harder is the instantaneous comprehension of exactly how to compose with imagination. Using the elements of feeling and empathy with an understated, yet powerful vision, she has transformed the ordinary into the exceptional."
-Burk Uzzle, SXSE Photo Magazine Sept/Oct 2014