BAND OF BIKERS
This world is filled with too many people who are content with being empty. Yet, every now and then, an underground wildcard pops up, full of intrigue and ready to redeem everything. Band of Bikers, a photo book recently published by PowerHouse (and a must-see photo exhibition opening tonight), is a collection of photographs that the poet and gallerist Scott Zieher found in the basement of his apartment building. The photographs, which had belonged to a recently-deceased man who had lived in Zieher’s building, depict a group of gay bikers meeting up at 1970s summer outings (members from motorcycle gangs including the Vikings, the Praetorians, the Scorpions, the Unicorns, the Druid are all depicted in the images). Accompanying the book is a beautiful, intensely readable essay, written by Zieher, on both the nature of these images and of found photography and ephemera writ large. “I’m straight and married and have never driven a motorcycle, but I’m a poet and a contemporary art dealer, so I certainly have exposure and sensitivity to aspects of gay culture,” says Zieher, of his intrigue when discovering these images. “For that matter, I first saw Kenneth Anger’s films and read his books as an undergraduate in Milwaukee in the mid-1980s, and came of age in an era when gender and sexual politics were pretty rampant issues at the university level. And the poets that made their most indelible impression on my younger self were often gay: Whitman, Crane, Ginsberg, O’Hara. Suffice to say one can’t call himself a decent poet and not find some affinity with a good portion of the predominant contemporary canon. [And] I have always had a fondness for vernacular photography. The fact that a completely unassuming amateur captured these weekends is what appeals most to me. It’s a marvel how much information [the photographer] managed to capture in such an offhanded way. These photographs comprise a gorgeous microcosm.” Like Anger’s 1964 masterpiece, Scorpio Rising, the images in Band of Bikers depict a fringe coterie of like-minded spirits, who seem to delight in finally finding their place in the world, if only for motor oil-scented weekend. The men in these photographs, living in a time post-Stonewall and pre-AIDS, represent a Halcyon moment in gay male sexual emancipation. There is a sense that the men depicted in these images, momentarily salvaged from the tyranny of status quo employment and disapproving families, were perhaps enjoying their truest moments of liberation.
Band of Bikers opens on February 25th at ZieherSmith Gallery, 516 West
20th Street, NYC
