American Bikers
These two volumes offer powerful portraits of people on the margins of society. To want to look away from the documentation of these disturbing "others" would be to deny a valuable aesthetic and sociological experience. First coming into contact with biker culture in 1990 at a bike rally raising funds for handicapped children, Miller spent five years photographing bikers at rallies across the United States. Likened by Keating to the work of Mathew Brady and Edward Curtis, these beautifully lit black-and-white images show men and women gazing directly into the camera and displaying the buttons, patches, sunglasses, piercings, and beards that are the trademarks of their outlaw status. Identified by a name, a nickname, their motorcycle, and/or their hometown, they epitomize their dream of being constantly on the move. "Robert Bergman's color portraits of people encountered by chance on the streets of American cities address the viewer with captivating simplicity and directness, in an idiom that is unencumbered by the norms or conventions of a period style," says the late Columbia University scholar Schapiro in his afterword. Traveling by car throughout the Rust Belt and the East Coast region, Bergman created a poignant portfolio of pathos that has been masterfully reproduced in this book. Morrison's introduction concludes, "In all its burnished majesty his gallery refuses us unearned solace and one by one each photograph unveils us, asserting a beauty, a kind of rapture, that is as close as can be to a master template of the singularity, the community, the unextinguishable sacredness of the human race." Both books are recommended for photography collections.?James E. Van Buskirk, San Francisco P.L.Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.