• As the summer reaches the height of the season, we all tend to slow down and take time off — the city streets empty and we strike out in search of cool water or more temperate weather. We felt that now is the perfect time to take a new look at an old icon of both summer and the 20th century — the automobile. Artist Langdon Clay’s 48 year-old project Cars, New York City 1974-1976 offers up a rich kaleidoscopic vision of a lost New York, the photographer’s unstaged images of vintage cars back-lit by forgotten neon signage evoking a nostalgia for summers past.
  • Langdon Clay's series, Cars: New York City, 1974-1976, explores an imprunt of the former streets of New York City. When...
    Langdon Clay's series, Cars: New York City, 1974-1976, explores an imprunt of the former streets of New York City. When Clay came to the realization that the bold colors of the world around him did not match the black & white film he was shooting, he shifted to color. Clay developed Cars with a big tripod, a Leica, a 40mm lens, Kodachrome film, and two years of roaming. The night developed its inherent color, with one car, and one background. Moved by painters such as Edward Hopper, Clay keeps these images, much like their subjects, classic. Cars showcases now vintage cars simplistically lit and shot straightforward, while still encapsulating the New York City  streets as its backgrounds. Yet, against their directness there is much detail for the eyes to wander over and take in, just as Langdon Clay once did on the very streets he captured.

    Langdon Clay is a photographer based in Sumner, Mississippi. His work is a testament to classic Americana and has been broadly exhibited at venues including Museum of Modern Art, New York; Polka Galerie, Paris, France; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Atlanta. His editorial work has been featured by the New York Times, Sunday Magazine, Metropolitan Home among others. Clay is in various collections such as the Art Institute of Chicago, IL;  J. Paul Getty Museum, LA; Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, France; and Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK.
  • To bring Langdon’s classic series into the 21st century, Jackson Fine Art collaborated with Assembly Curated, a Web3 platform, to...
    To bring Langdon’s classic series into the 21st century, Jackson Fine Art collaborated with Assembly Curated, a Web3 platform, to release 30 NFTs and concurrently Jackson Fine Art will be selling 35 physical prints in the gallery from this collection. NFTs have been in the fast lane for the last year, and as the crypto market is beginning to coast, Jackson Fine Art remains intrigued with the digital token authentication of fine art photography. 

    In educating ourselves in this developing landscape Jackson Fine Art decided to take a test drive and collaborated with Assembly Curates, co-founded in 2021 by Ashlyn Davis Burns (formerly of Houston Center for Photography) and Shane Lavalette (formerly Light Work). Both curators come from the conventional art world and share in Jackson Fine Art’s vision on supporting world-class fine art photographers through thoughtful curation to — “building community, engagement, and value around images." We believe that the traditional print market and the emerging digital one are not mutually exclusive, but may one day work in tandem — and are curious to see where this road takes us as curators, artists, and collectors.

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  • 'Cars were an indispensable aspect of the twentieth-century American culture for both their utility and aesthetics. From 1974-1976, Langdon Clay...
    'Cars were an indispensable aspect of the twentieth-century American culture for both their utility and aesthetics. From 1974-1976, Langdon Clay...
    'Cars were an indispensable aspect of the twentieth-century American culture for both their utility and aesthetics. From 1974-1976, Langdon Clay...
    'Cars were an indispensable aspect of the twentieth-century American culture for both their utility and aesthetics. From 1974-1976, Langdon Clay...
    "Cars were an indispensable aspect of the twentieth-century American culture for both their utility and aesthetics. From 1974-1976, Langdon Clay photographed the cars he encountered while wandering the streets of New City and nearby Hoboken, New Jersey at night. Shot in Kodachrome with a Leica and deftly lit with then-new sodium vapor lights, the pictures feature a distinct array of makes and models set against the gritty details of their surrounding urban and architectural environments and occasionally the ghostly presence of people."
    —  Steidl
  • Langdon Clay, St. Vincent's Car, Cadillac Coupe de Ville, St. Vincent's Hospital, 13th and 7th Avenue, 1975

    Langdon Clay

    St. Vincent's Car, Cadillac Coupe de Ville, St. Vincent's Hospital, 13th and 7th Avenue, 1975
    "I can't stop looking at Langdon Clay's parade of parked cars in New York in the magic years 1974-1976, arrayed like mugshots but lit like Hollywood stars. They rule the night, those Pintos and Chargers and Gremlins and Checkers and Galaxie 500s and Fairlanes and Sables and Rivieras and LeSabres and Eldorados. They unashamedly flaunt their dents, their rust spots, their mismatched doors, their liberal applications of Bondo, their repairs effected with masking tape — but then some of them revel in butch-wax jobs like you don't see anymore, gleaming like the twilight's last sigh. They are parked close to the curb because they don't want to lose their wing mirrors (although at least one of them already has), but they flout no-parking signs, fireplugs, church and school and hospital entrance regulations because this is a city where nobody sweats the details." —  Lucy Sante
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