The Machine and the Man

He came to me with the idea of photographing himself with his motorcycle. He was a professional athlete and coach, a man accustomed to training, discipline and the endless business of making the body do what it is told. But there was another side to him, less orderly and perhaps more interesting: the motorcycles, the speed, the noise, the whole strange attraction of machines that are made to go faster than anyone really needs to go.

I decided not to make a polite portrait of a sportsman standing beside his bike. The light had to have the same attitude as the man. I used a hard, contrasting setup with strong backlight, deep shadows and saturated colour, the kind of lighting often used in sports photography to make the body appear almost sculpted. The motorcycle was treated in much the same way. It was not merely a prop. It was part of the character.

The difficult thing was to keep the two from fighting for attention. The man had to remain powerful without looking like he was trying to prove it, while the motorcycle had to feel fast even though it was standing perfectly still. We adjusted the light, the position and the angle until the shapes began to work together. And then, as sometimes happens in photography, the moment came when there was nothing left to fix. The picture simply stopped asking for anything more.

Perhaps that is why I like this kind of portrait. A man can spend years building his body, buying the machine he dreams about, learning how to ride it, and collecting all the things that belong to that world. But in the end, a photograph reduces all of it to one quiet moment: the man, the machine, and the look that passes between them.