Retro counter-culture: 1960's Biker photography.

I love old photographs, and I am particularly partial to photographs that deal with the 'underside' of culture. There is little doubt that being a leather clad biker in 1960's Middle America was pretty much as savory as being a machine gun totting Nigerian in the centre of Johannesburg today...

I will admit that I have never been that much of a 'rocker' fan (boy racer bikes, brillcream ducktails, and leather jackets, workers boots, and bluejeans). I was always much more intrigued by the 'Modernist' movement of England in the early 1960's (suits, two tone shoes, racial integration, Vespa and Lambretta scooters, and the music of the The Who, The Kinks, and Southern Soul revival). In fact, my love for my Vespa started because I was a Mod back in the early 1980's (when modernism went through something of a revival with the music of The Jam and The Style Council).

Amazingly, it was the lyrics of the Special A.K.A (and their 1970's song "Free Nelson Mandela", which not surprisingly was banned in South Africa) that first got me thinking about our diabolic political situation in South Africa. The very first poem that I ever had published (in the WITS University United Democratic Front newsletter (a then grouping of the banned ANC, PAC, IFP and various other liberation movements) was inspired by the Southern Soul movement of the 1980's mods. Amazing issues of segregation and racial abuse were still common in the UK as late as 1980. PS. I still own a 1965 Fishtail Parka (with fur on the hood, patches all over it... And of course, a somewhat squashed Vespa! ha ha!)

Well, here's the book of 1960's biker photographs:

In the mid-1960s, photographer Danny Lyon spent several years riding with the Chicago Outlaws and documenting their scene on film. The resultant book, The Bikeriders (1968), is recognized as the first photo book about the biker subculture. It's currently available from Chronicle Books. Smithsonian magazine looks back on that moment in Lyon's career, and tells the story of the portrait above of club members Sparky and CowBoy. From Smithsonian:

Cowboy and Sparky, two pals on bikes. They've just been to a motorcycle race in Schererville, Indiana, and their girlfriends will soon get off work from the Dairy Queen. It is November 1965, and CowBoy - Irvin P. Dunsdon, who uses the capital B to this day - is 23 years old. He feels he's on top of the world.

He and Sparky — Charles Ritter - met in the Army and bonded instantly. When CowBoy got out of the service in 1964, he moved not to Utah, where he came from, but to Gary, Indiana—Sparky's hometown—so he could be there when Sparky got back from Vietnam a year later.

Now, in '65, they stick up for each other. They take no grief from anyone. They share the joy of biking on the open road. They belong to the Gary Rogues, a local motorcycle club.

Link to Smithsonian, Link to buy The Bikeriders book

Technorati tags: counter culture, Mods and Rockers, Biker culture, Vespa, gun totting Nigerians, classic photography