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Living the Life, biker photography, biker poetry

by Doug Barber

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read in December 2009

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Doug Barber said: " “Living the Life – Explaining the Whole Thing”

Rusty Baker put together a museum exhibit that included Doug Barber's photographs called Motorcycles and Art: 1950 - Present for the Susquehanna Art Museum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 2004. The exhibit “Living the Life – Explaining the Whole Thing”

Rusty Baker put together a museum exhibit that included Doug Barber's photographs called Motorcycles and Art: 1950 - Present for the Susquehanna Art Museum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 2004. The exhibition included fifteen motorcycles, five images from Barber, and about sixty other works of art. He had invited Doug Barber to be a part of it because he was immediately drawn to his work. It was real. It was part of the past, but there was more to it than that.

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Motorcycling gets under your skin. Whether you are new to it or have been riding since you were a kid, riding takes you places that only you can go. Whether it be work, war, or women that inspire you, at the end of the road your story is yours. The first time someone describes you as a "biker" and you overhear it, you may be proud or pissed off but one thing is for sure, what has gotten under your skin is now visible to others. Living the Life is a clear window into the history of American motorcycling, a huge history of machines, technology, culture, social politics, and the individuals who have their own tales to tell. Whenever you take a complicated thing like motorcycling and make some part of it visible, like the iceberg and its tip, you run some risks, one of them being that you will have to explain the whole thing.

As with any artist, the success of Barber's work often relies upon a little good luck. Good luck could have the entire G volume of the Biker Encyclopedia, but we might all agree that bicycles, not luck, are the real reason it is possible for any of us ride motorcycles. A little over a hundred years ago, people in Germany put a motor on a bicycle. Hotel Orlando Sidewalk Comando (page 46) is not about motorcycling, and yet it is. It is how all of us start, imagining our two wheels and oily chain have a better motor than just our skinny legs. This is a lucky kid, shot well by a lucky photographer. If there is any luck at all left in the world, the little biker in this picture may now be getting some gray in his beard or ponytail and is out there riding, too.

Orlando (inside cover spread),, seems to portray the same group of bikers barely visible in Hotel Orlando. It may be the same hotel or another one on the way, but there's something remarkable about this shot. It's a sum of its parts. Never mind the picture is hip enough to be an album cover for The Band. There is rest. There is dirt. There is dirt you don't care about because rest is better, laughter is better, PBR or something somebody twisted up is better. 2Orlando, like most of the images in Living the Life, come from another time but are timeless. This group could just as easily be a group of Confederate Calvary taking a break in the streets of some Pennsylvania town in 1863. We are them and they are us.

If riding is the one pure thing about being a biker, the one place where nothing else matters, a neutral ground for the good, the bad, and the ugly to find some small scrap of peace, we need images like this to remind us of the pure joy of riding Welcome Back,(page 42). The rider's posture, his whipping vest, and the hazy, otherworldly background flashing by tell you this thing is speeding up all the time. This rider, this bike, this whole world are just fading into the rush of it. He is drinking in the wind that Sorez' poem so beautifully describes. This image reminds me of the dedication image, IMO Ricky, which honors a man who was clearly content and comfortable in his own skin on two wheels.

There is always the dream of a having a better bike, improving your ride, or getting your hands dirty, and Jan’s Kitchen/Basket Case (page 32) is the place for that. It's not for everyone, working on motorcycles, but everyone does something they must do to their bike now and then with some deadline looming. Sturgis. Daytona. Laconia. Blessing of the Bikes. The list is endless, but we must get there. You may have no garage. You may not have a mechanic. You may have a thin wallet but have some skills. If you miss a chance to ride with your people, it is hard for you to forget. This is a part of Living the Life.

Sorez the Scribe's words, as in the case of many other poems in Living the Life, strike a true tone on the tuning fork next to the picture Run Gathering (spread 142).. The deal is that all of us always ride solo whether we like it or not. Motorcycling, like your work life or your personal life or your spiritual life, is just you at the core. You can ride in a group or with a club. You can go to work or take care of your kids or go to church, and you are around other people all the time, but your time on the earth is yours, your only property. You try to take people or things with you, it just gets complicated. Riding is something you must do alone even in a pack of a thousand bikes, and it becomes part of you sometimes best kept as a small, knowing smile on your own face, a joke to yourself, a good way to go into the night.

Like that significant, understanding quiet in a conversation between friends or a long rest in a great stretch of music, it's not always the noise we make but the wind in between that matters. That is Living the Life.

Rusty Baker Curator
Motorcycles and Art: 1950 – Present
Susquehanna Art Museum in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania ...more "

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(page 150 of 180)
— Dec 28, 2009 03:22PM

Dec 26, 2009 11:38AM · see review