Last August, while on a road trip with a friend in upstate New York, the Italian photographer Lucia Buricelli stumbled on a small car show. Her work tends to focus on the consumerist culture, so she was immediately intrigued by the vehicles—how the owners were obsessed with how they appeared, and went to great lengths to personalize each of them. Afterward, she looked up similar events in the Tri-State Area, and this past summer into the fall, she attended as many as she could, creating images that explore the sensory experiences people have with their automobiles. In short, her pictures are surreal, weird, and nonlinear, and like those of her influence Martin Parr, they have a graphic quality, too. Buricelli's ongoing series, American Muscle, shows just how surreal the relationship can be between Americans and their possessions.
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Check out an exclusive preview of these photos below. You can follow Lucia Buricelli's work here. Originally from Venice, Italy, and currently based in New York City, she was recently nominated for PDN's 30: New and Emerging Photographers to Watch.Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of VICE delivered to your inbox daily.
