36 pages
printed in England
staple bound
14cm x 20cm
In 1979 Bill Jay was teaching photography at Arizona State University and I was shooting a book on bikers. Bill had helped the careers of many young British photographers during the 1960s with his influential magazine, “Creative Camera.” I gave a slide show to Bill’s students of work in progress on the biker book, with three members of the Dirty Dozen Motorcycle Club, one with his leg in plaster, sitting in the back row. They seemed to like the project because they later invited me to join them for a weekend ride in the Arizona desert.
I suspect that there was a certain novelty for the bikers in having a British photographer with a plumy accent in their midst but all I can remember was keeping my face firmly behind the camera and capturing as much of their lives as I could in a single weekend. These pictures are the result of that 48 hours.
Thirty years on one of Bill’s students, who had made the original cotact with the bikers, wrote to me from Arizona asking if I could get her a copy of the book, “BikeRiders”. She had been in a relationship with the president of the Dirty Dozen, with whom I’d ridden pillion, and they had had a son, now in his twenties. She later wrote to share the good news that the book had brought father and son closer together. The sadder postscript was that many of the Clubs members had died or been imprisoned since my short but special journey with them in the Arizona desert.
