Wreckage, Spencer Ostrander's visual study of ruined car bodies, began in 2023 when he was driving his father-in-law, Paul Auster, ill with cancer, for five weeks of radiation treatment from Park Slope in Brooklyn to the Upper East Side of Manhattan and back again. For years, Ostrander passed the impounded vehicles outside the 90th Street Police Precinct in Brooklyn, 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, the mangled remains of unknown human stories. Told in the language of vivid color and abstract form, they bear mute witness to the drivers and passengers, to the flesh and blood missing from the pictures, and to the strangeness of mortality itself.

Spencer Ostrander was born in Seattle in 1984 and has lived in New York City for the past two decades. He has published three books of photography, Times Square in the Rain (2022, Hatje Cantz), Long Live King Kobe (2022, ZE Books), and Bloodbath Nation (2023, Grove Press) with text by Paul Auster.