Danny Lyon Scrambles Track, McHenry, Illinois, USA. 1965
The Bikeriders was a book made in two worlds, the world of motorcycle racers and the world of the Outlaws. The track at McHenry was a favorite destin (...)
ation for both. Racers scrambled on the hilly dirt track winding through the woods. The Outlaws lay in the grassy hills above to watch. Leather-clad riders reached the peak of a hill and both wheels left the ground. Watching the racers in the ground glass of my Rolleiflex, I knelt behind a snow fence, my foreground. There was something dark and forbidding about the landscape before me, like a Dürer etching or Brueghel painting. The track at McHenry was the curator Hugh Edwards’s favorite picture in my book. When I republished the picture later with Aperture in a horizontal format book, Edwards said it was the wrong design. It had to be vertical. “You would design an entire book around this one picture?” I asked. “Yes,” he answered.
– Danny Lyon © Danny Lyon | Magnum Photos