On Wednesday nights in the summer of 1972, Van Nuys Boulevard became a theater of chrome, neon, and adolescent fervor. Muscle cars rolled beside lowriders and Volkswagens; surfers, street racers, waitresses, mechanics, and car salesmen moved through the same bright strip. Returning to the boulevard he had known as a teenager, photographer Rick McCloskey spent more than a dozen weeks among them. He understood the automobile as social currency, and the boulevard as the place where it could be spent in public.
Van Nuys Blvd 1972 gathers 118 black-and-white photographs from those nights. Chrome and custom bodywork drew McCloskey’s lens, as did the girls perched on hoods, boys leaning through windows, and workers caught beneath the carnival glare of marquees and roadside signs. The sequence advances like a reel of outtakes from a movie without a star, its sprawling cast bound together by the pleasure of seeing and being seen.
Published by Sturm & Drang in 2020, this out-of-print first edition is number four of twenty-five special copies. Signed by McCloskey, it is accompanied by a signed and numbered silver gelatin print of the book’s unforgettable image of two barefoot girls on a car, perfectly at home above the traffic.
