Portraits of American Bikers: Life in the 1960s Special Edition
A comparison to The Bikeriders, a 1968 series of biker photos by Danny Lyon is unavoidable, and here the differences are most apparent. In photography circles, The Bikeriders has become a legendary debut photo book, still considered the most controversial and brutal book of its kind, sealing Lyon s reputation as the first to document the Outlaw bikers. Lyon, who was born in 1942, was a baby-boomer and of a younger generation then the Depression-era born Miteff. Lyon used the faster, more portable 35mm camera, the most popular camera of the 1960s. When held beside Flash s work, Lyon (who rode with the Chicago chapter of the Outlaws for two years) reads foreign, self-conscious and somewhat distant, a stranger entering a world he is trying to frame and explain. Lyon had a journalistic mind and was embedded in the Outlaws, self-aware of his position and slightly frightened of it. Lyon viewed his life within the Outlaws as an undercover anti-Life-magazine assignment. Looking at his work today it seems far less cutting-edge then it did in 1967. Flash seems totally at ease inside this world, like an elder statesman, a politician or poet taking the viewer by the hand on an underworld journey. Flash is self-assured, knowing exactly where and when to shoot. He controls the shots in a way most photographers only dream about. His eye is always in command, merging with the streets and the people he is photographing, and his photographs are all edge, sharp as razors. There is no doubt that if Flash had published his work anytime in the 60s, he would be considered a giant in photographic history. Such are the vagaries of time and fashion. --Cary Loren (Nero Magazine)