Brooklyn Kings: New York City’s Black Bikers | By Martin Dixon | powerHouse Books | 139 pages | Photography
Commercial photographer Martin Dixon — he lists the Ford Foundation and Guinness among his clients — also teaches documentary photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York. His recent book, “Brooklyn Kings: New York City’s Black Bikers,” is a study of a number of motorcycle clubs and the members’ interests, which, as Dixon explains, “range from social dances, road trips, and trophy parties to bikini bike washes, birthday strippers … weekly fish fries and ‘Crab Nights.'” The bikers are also, of course, fascinated by motorcycles, as is Dixon.
“I began this book as a social document of a dying breed of man — The Lone Wolf, The Biker Nomad, The Urban Gladiator, Black Caesars, and Crooklyn Cowboys,” he writes in an essay parked in the center of the volume. “What I have photographed is in many ways the best of what we were when we were just being ourselves. This should not be lost … eventually a time will come when we will no longer be able to sling a leg over our chromed chariots. Natural forces are at work. Age sets in … and when that day comes, as it surely must, we can look at this book as our family album [of] nearly fifty clubs and thousands of members who form the nucleus of the Black biker circuit.”
Dixon ends his essay like so:
The sign on the door at the Black Falcons Biker Club:
What you see here
what you do here
what you say here
stays here.Well now I’m fucked.
Portfolio
Urban gladiators
A gallery of photos from Brooklyn Kings: New York City’s Black Bikers
