Beginning and Bikes
I started riding dirt bikes, quads and the like when I was a kid, but it wasn’t until 2009 that I bought a street bike. My first motorcycle was a 1978 Yamaha SR500 that lasted about 5 months until I killed it.
After doing that weekend training course that you have to do in California, me and a few guys rode towards El Mirage and Wrightwood. It was a great thing to learn the dynamics of riding in a group early.
If I can find some parts for my bike in the US to make it my own, that’s a huge plus. I would love to own a garage full of British beauties, but I ride what I own, and I have a tendency to ride a little harder than the bike should be, so anything easily fixed is helpful. I enjoy anything that has a nice vintage line to it…I don’t care if it is a Honda ‘cafe racer,’ a stock Triumph Tiger or an Ironhead chopper…if it looks like it is ridden regularly and has a cool line and soul to it, it’s a keeper.
Emotions…elation and anxiety.
Living and riding in Los Angeles can fry your patience and your nerves pretty quickly, but it’s taught me to be more alert. Once I’m out of the city it’s free and easy. Every now and then on a longer ride I’ll take a moment, look around, realize that it’s absolutely gorgeous around me, and it’s all elation.
Photography
I would like to think that I don’t just photograph bikes as trophy pieces. All of the stories and rides that I photograph I try to show a narrative, and the motorcycles are tools and characters within the narrative. Motorcycles represent a piece of the lifestyle that I enjoy photographing and living, so it comes pretty natural. The tough part is trying make photographs that get people to see the narrative and not just the bikes.
When I started ‘It’s Better in the Wind’ as a photo project, I read up and learned everything I could about the history of motorcycles. My dad used to own a couple bikes when I was a kid, but he split when I was young, and didn’t really pass anything on. I went headfirst into whatever I could, I can be a bit obsessive about something that I get my heart into. The name came from a line I read in an article…and I think it summed up what I was after, as it related directly to motorcycling, as well as proverbially to my penchant for wandering and being on the road. Chasing Horizons came about from a curator friend of mine in Australia. He named the solo show ‘Furthest Horizons’ and to tie it in with both the title and the nature of the photos (mostly being travel lifestyle oriented) I went with Chasing Horizons. They are both personal mantras of mine I guess.
Continuity and Outcome
I don’t really see much of an outcome really…traveling isn’t a box on a list you can check. Once you start, you don’t/can’t really stop. The experience has been rich – full of good times and good people, it’s impossible to complain.
I actually have not traveled coast to coast yet, and I will tell you that it is definitely on the ‘to do’ list. I guess I just like being on the road, seeing new things, finding a history that isn’t taught in books. We get too tied to our comfortable routines, and I get very restless very quickly when I don’t have a project in the works. The whole project sparked from my need to start something new for myself, and to feed the wanderlust I had.
Photography is my passion and my full-time profession, and I rarely see it as having any restrictions or borders. I have a couple of photo essays that have been on the shelf with all of the work that the ‘Wind’ project has taken, and I’m looking forward to bringing them back to life. Motorcycles is more of a hobby to get me away from the desk, and I’ve really been digging vintage flat track racers these days.
As for travel plans or what have you, I’d love to continue to travel within the North American continent…we as a culture are obsessed with traveling overseas as a sort of badge of honor, but end up sticking to Americanized tourist zones because we rarely learn another language in this country. Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to visit Barcelona and take in the rich artistic and architectural culture, but I still can’t describe what Montana looks like to anyone, so I’ll start there first. I’d love to travel through Canada to Alaska, and see what trouble I can get myself into.
