Artist Talk: Matthew Porter

Aperture Foundation, in collaboration with the Photography Program at Parsons School of Design, of The New School, is pleased to present an artist talk with Matthew Porter. Join us for a night discussing Porter’s forthcoming book, The Heights, a portfolio of twenty-five images of vintage cars, captured in midair as they careen over city streets and highway intersections. Each photograph is a freeze-frame­ – a hypothetical film still from a pulp-fiction chase scene. The images form a hybrid of hyperreality and studied, topographic description, part bittersweet nostalgia and part ironic reinvention of a classic American trope. Within his diverse interests as an image-maker, Porter has returned time and again to photographing these cars, as a kind of punctuation of his practice.

Matthew Porter (born in State College, Pennsylvania, 1975) is a graduate of Bard College and of the ICP-Bard MFA Program in Advanced Photographic Studies, New York. His work was included in Photography Is Magic (Aperture, 2015), and his first book, Archipelago, was published in 2015. Porter’s work is represented by M+B, Los Angeles, and Invisible-Exports, New York. He lives and works in Brooklyn.

Image: Matthew Porter, Airport Road, 2009; from Matthew Porter: The Heights (Aperture, 2019)
© Matthew Porter

Aperture Foundation’s public programs are supported, in part, by generous donations from our Board of Trustees; our Members and other individuals; corporate and private foundations, including the Grace Jones Richardson Trust and the Jane Smith Turner Foundation; and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.