Most of life happens in the in-between. The unfinished projects, the jobs that aren’t quite the dream, the cars that run but could always use a little more attention. We like to imagine life as a series of destinations, but most of the time we are suspended in the middle, moving toward something we can’t fully see yet. That space is where Rashod’s story lives.
He grew up in South Central Los Angeles before his family pulled him east to Atlanta. One world of concrete and grit traded for another of red clay and Southern rhythm. At eleven, he was already carrying two versions of himself. Cars would give him a way to connect them. The first was a Pontiac Grand Am, more dented memory than machine after he buried it into the back of a truck. By fifteen he understood how quickly a car could humble you.
The Eclipse followed, lowered, tuned, noisy enough to fit the Atlanta streets. It felt fast, dangerous, and alive. The city had its own codes: lifted trucks, chrome, stereos that shook windows, kids with new German cars rolling through the same parking lots. Rashod moved between all of it. “The cars became a language,” he says. “One that crossed backgrounds and neighborhoods.”
Years later, his compass pointed west again. Los Angeles still pulled at him. “I’m from Atlanta, Georgia, by way of South Central Los Angeles,” he says. “I would say that my internal compass always pointed west, so I had to eventually find my way back home.” He wanted something classic this time, something that felt like it carried a past of its own. Porsche 911s and Alfa GTs all turned his head, but it was a Florida Green 1600 tucked away in a Lancaster garage that stopped him. Faded paint, cracked dash, original details intact. “Sometimes they say the car finds you,” Rashod says. He hadn’t set out to be a patina guy, but this car made him one.
The motor didn’t last. “One day in West Hollywood, the engine just goes bang,” he remembers. That failure forced his hand and introduced him to a builder who pushed an M20 swap. Underneath the old shell, the car took on E30 bones: prop shaft, diff, custom exhaust, widened wheels, stronger brakes. Top half 1967, bottom half something else entirely. “It’s got character, personality, it’s temperamental,” he says. He’s driven it more than 15,000 miles since, fixing, learning, carrying on. The car refuses polish, and so does he. That’s the point.
Driving it sharpened him. No electronics, no power steering, no space for distraction. “You really got to lock in,” he says. The car demanded presence, and in return it gave him quiet. On canyon roads and PCH, the noise of the city fell away. The BMW wasn’t a museum piece. It was a tool, flawed and alive, reminding him to focus.
That focus bled into something else. Tired of shooting his own car, Rashod picked up a camera and started aiming it at others. “Cars are just rubber, metal, gasoline, plastic,” he says. “Really what’s cool is the people behind them.” What began as photos grew into Motoring While Black, not a manifesto but a way to hold onto stories that might otherwise disappear. Ordinary drives, fleeting moments, the kinds of things that don’t look special until years later.
The more he looked, the more he saw a culture outside the polish. Not concours lawns or marketing gloss, but the middle ground. Everyday drivers, cracked dashboards, mismatched history. “All of these mundane moments that don’t seem special in the moment will mean something later,” he says. His own BMW was proof: worn, imperfect, but more authentic than anything brand new.
He calls it liminal, “between careers, between what the car is and what it might become.” The BMW still needs interior work, maybe new wheels, maybe hotter cams. He doesn’t want to turbo it, just refine what’s there. “Where I’m at with the car and where I’m at in life is sort of the liminal stage,” he says. Unfinished, but not incomplete. The car gave him a way in, the camera gave him a way to speak, and the community gave him reasons to keep going.
Rashod’s story isn’t about perfection. It’s about persistence, carving meaning out of cars, cameras, and the space between. The Grand Am wreck, the Eclipse years, the Florida Green 1600, the photos that turned into a brand, none of it was linear, but all of it built to now. The BMW sits in the driveway as proof that becoming matters more than arriving. Like its driver, it’s still in motion, and that’s exactly where the story gets good.
