The Bikeriders: The 1960s photography that inspired the film

Jun 30, 2024

"The Bikeriders", an American crime drama written and directed by Jeff Nichols and starring Jodie Comer, Austin Butler, Tom Hardy, Michael Shannon, Mike Faist, and Norman Reedus, has been entertaining audiences in theatres for a few months now. And it's a common topic of conversation here at the shop, with reviews being mixed at best.

But many are surprised to hear that the film was actually inspired by a 1968 photo series by American photographer and filmmaker Danny Lyon.

Armed with a Nikon, a Rolleiflex, and a seven-pound portable tape recorder, Lyon photographed, traveled with and shared the lifestyle of bikers in the American Midwest from 1963 to 1967. Living in a rented apartment in Woodlawn, Chicago, he followed the Chicago chapter of the Outlaws Motorcycle Club in an "attempt to record and glorify the life of the American bike rider".

Seeking advice from Hunter S. Thompson, who spent a year with the Hells Angels for his own book, Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, Thompson warned Lyon that he should "get the hell out of that club unless it's absolutely necessary for photo action."

"The Bikeriders is a personal record, dealing mostly with bikeriders whom I know and care for," Lyon says. "If anything has guided this work beyond the facts of the worlds presented it is what I have come to believe is the spirit of the bikeriders: the spirit of the hand that twists open the throttle on the crackling engines of big bikes and rides them on racetracks or through traffic or, on occasion, into oblivion."

Lyon had first taken up motorcycling as an undergraduate, tearing laps around the University of Chicago 's circle drive with fellow enthusiasts. Soon he was attending local races, increasingly with his camera, already pre-visualizing his first book – a new kind of photo-story, very different from what appeared in the pages of Life Magazine.

After four years with the Outlaws, Lyon emerged with what has come to be seen as one of the defining photo books of the 1960s, The Bikeriders. In hindsight, the importance of this book is hard to overstate. “The Bikeriders represented a significant step in 1960s American photography," Martin Parr writes in The Photobook: A History, Vol. I. "Not only launching an important photographic career, but also giving a younger generation of photographers a spokesman of their own age,”

A giant of post-War documentary photography and film, Danny Lyon helped define a mode of photojournalism in which the picture-maker is deeply and personally embedded in his subject matter. As such, he is a godfather of sorts to a generation of photographers such as Nan Goldin and Larry Clark. A graduate of the University of Chicago, Lyon began his career in the early 1960s documenting the Civil Rights movement for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

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