The Bikewright
Documentary Photo Essay w/ Sycip Custom Bicycles
North of San Francisco, in the rolling hills of Sonoma County, where business meetings are often taken outdoors and on-trail, there is a man named Jeremy that builds bicycles.
I discovered Jeremy’s shop while I was fervently researching the bike industry for a unique photo story angle. I get bored quickly when I hear the words “shred” or “send” too often so I was looking for something completely different (not that I don’t liberally pepper my own weekends with that kind of verbiage…maybe I’m just tired of hearing myself say it…). I’d gone down a rabbit hole of custom frame builders, gotten a little lost day dreaming about my own touring bike desires, and found my way onto www.sycip.com. He actually lives close to me, he’s a true artisan, and his archive features a bike he built with a holstered chainsaw for trail maintenance! This was clearly my dude.
I like to make imagery that feels deeply immersive and real which I accomplish by first building rapport with my subjects so that I can get up close and personal with their stories. Whether I’m working with professional talent or real people, I’m always looking for a relatively similar outcome - an authentic feeling aesthetic that feels real and moments that are just quirky or weird enough to be a spectacle and draw viewers into the story. Whether I’m working with professional talent or real people I’m working towards goal, but with real folks, I know I’m a guest in their world, rather than the other way around. Jeremy was kind enough to make time and space for me to visit his shop a couple times for this project and I deliberately left my camera and lights in the car for the first hour+ I was there.
My grandfather was a shipwright, and when I first entered the Sycip shop, I was instantly transported to a memory of the old boatyard. My nose rang with the familiar smell of cutting fluid, and my eyes settled easily into the patterns of ordered chaos created by a lifetime of manipulating raw materials into meaningful machines. My grandfather’s shop was a place that was full or purpose, it was a sort of comfortably dim, utilitarian space lit almost entirely by natural light from the open half of the building that faced out to the Pacific ocean. A perpetual tangle of machines, lumber and salvaged parts seemed to organically grow out of every corner, reaching towards the vessel suspended in the middle. I quickly understood that I wanted Jeremy’s shop to be lit and photographed in a stylistic echo of my childhood memories - Jeremy and his machines at the center of the mayhem looking moody and mysterious in the dim, natural glow with just a sprinkle of danger-light from his welding torch.
Jeremy was nice enough to let me turn off his glaring overhead halogen shop lights while he welded in the dark. The shop has one large rolling door which provided a good balance of soft, but directional ambient light (good for photography, less ideal for human eyes hidden behind a welding mask). For a bit of extra drama and to help separate the subject from the background, a created a “sun beam” from a large strobe outside the glass doors at the opposite end of the room. With this fairly broad setup I was able to move around fluidly and find a handful of angles that well worked for both lighting and composition. By the time he started shooting flames around the space and brazing his signature coin details on, I knew exactly where I had to be for the best shots.
The balance of beauty and reality that’s emerging in this project feels exactly on brand for my aesthetic in this moment. It’s perhaps a bit ironic to be making these photos in the Bay Area, but in a world where AI is rapidly eroding our trust and homogenizing our idea of beauty, I find myself more and more drawn to imagery that leaves dirt under the nails and prioritizes grit over perfection. Reality is inspiring, real people forge real connections, and the values embodied by people like Jeremy are more important than ever.
I’m sharing this work on the portfolio blog and sending it around to editors and art buyers now, even though the project isn’t entirely finished. I have at least one more day of work to do with Sycip; portraits, some personal details, and, yes, even some action shots that scream “shred the gnar”
