The photos are warm and grainy, some of them taken at an angle. They show four young men smiling — no, beaming. It’s 1991: The jackets are puffy, the shoes are high-top, and the hair is specific.
In the photo, the men are somewhere in Beverly Hills, where, whether they realized it or not, they were manifesting a new future. Standing in front of the large glass windows of a luxury car showroom at night, butterfly doors opening up like angel wings in the background, the men in the photos feel like they’re on the precipice of something special. They’re fronting, they’re flexing, they’re bonding.
The people in the images are the elders of Image’s fashion director at large, Keyla Marquez, captured at time when they’d recently immigrated to L.A. from El Salvador.
This was their ritual: After endless days working at restaurants, Marquez’s uncles, father and family friend would book it to Beverly Hills, where they’d post up in front of fancy car dealerships that sold Ferraris, Porsches and Rolls-Royces, and have photo shoots. In the moment, it was something to do, a reason to get out of the two-bedroom apartment they shared with three families, a way to take up space in this new city. It’s a photographic tradition that was familiar to photographer Thalía Gochez, whose own father came to the U.
S. from El Salvador as a young teenager and also used to take pictures of himself in front of classic cars around L.A.
, inscribed with love notes to her mother on the bac.