AFP Exhibit from American Festivals Project on Vimeo.

Last weekend we were able to celebrate the end of our project by hosting an exhibit and party in our hometown of Charlottesville, VA.  Our friends over at The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative opened up their gallery and created the place to be on First Fridays.  It was a real joy to finally see our photos in print and have our closest friends and family there.  Brother Sean made an incredible mix of Cajun and Zydeco music, while we made an open call for people to bring food and turn the evening into a potluck.  What a turnout we had!  From 6:30-10:30 the place was packed!  Many people told us later they couldn’t even see the photographs because of the dense crowd.

The AFP attended festivals and events and parties for over a year, and there was no better way to end the project by having our own “festival” in Charlottesville.  Thanks to our many friends who helped set up the exhibit the week before:  Sean, Julie, Buster, Johnny, Maria, Mandy, Kevin, and Ashley.  Ya’ll are the best.

link: http://www.wvtf.org/news_and_notes/index.php

mp3: http://www.wvtf.org/news_and_notes/audio/201001060941190.festivalphotogs.mp3

The AFP is kicking off 2010 with the biggest party of the year…so far!  Please join us in Charlottesville Friday January 8th for the opening night of the American Festivals Project print exhibit.  A selection of our finest images will be on display including plenty of print surprises.  There will be lots of food and wine, so bring a dish if you can, come hungry, and come ready to party.

What: American Festivals Project exhibit opening!
Where: The Bridge | Progressive Arts Initiative, 209 Monticello Rd, Charlottesville, Va 22902
When: Friday January 8th, 5:30pm-10:30pm
Food and Wine: We’re supplying the wine (lots of it).  If you can bring an appetizer dish of some kind it would be greatly appreciated!

We hope to see all of you there.  Please bring any friends or family you’d like.  Prints will also be available for sale at the show.  If you can’t make the show or are just interested in seeing what prints are available for sale, please see this link for our list of images for purchase:  http://www.photoshelter.com/c/banjowen/gallery/AFP-Print-Sale/G0000wLcigSu9VLI

Thanks to everyone’s incredible support throughout the year.  Come celebrate with us!

-Andrew and Ross

See it HERE.

Listen here!

Quickly, and almost imperceptibly to most of the town of Charlottesville, it came and went.  There were a few flyers here and there and it was announced on the Paramount marquee, but on each it said USPDF.  And what common pedestrian is expected to know what USPDF stands for?  Would you have guessed US Pole Dancing Federation?

I don’t even remember how I heard about it. But I wasn’t planning on being in Charlottesville on October 4th. The plan was to be on a boat relaxing. This wasn’t something the AFP could pass up though, especially since it was in our hometown theater. Ross was leaving for Israel the next day, so, alas, I would have to go this one alone. As you can imagine there was some resistance to a young male photographer asking for behind the scenes access to a pole dancing competition. I called ahead and explained the concept of the AFP to the governing body and event host the USPDF, and thankfully was able to convince them of my purely photographic intentions. I was working on a hunch that this could be a great event for the AFP and I think I was right. With my audio recorder, I interviewed the competitors and tried to capture some of the sounds backstage to pair with the images.

US Pole Dancing East Coast Regionals from American Festivals Project on Vimeo.

I don’t think the blog post here needs to be extensive on the analysis. The women speaking in the video do a pretty excellent job of sharing the way they see it. But it’s a fine line between women who perform on the pole as strippers and the women who perform as artists and competitors. To the casual observer, the difference is negligible. It’s erotic, it’s high heels and tiny outfits, it’s women climbing on a pole. But when you actually watch one of these events, you can begin to tell that these women are pursuing something far beyond the agenda of the late night club girls. Yes, it’s sexy but all the underpinnings of Sport are there…extensive training, athleticism, team bonding, competition… As I see it though, there are 2 major flaws in pole dancing that will challenge it’s ability to be accepted as a legit sport. The first is that it’s in the dark.   Keep the house lights on and nobody’s going to get the same sexy vibe as when it’s dark. It’ll look more like a gymnastics routine. The second flaw is the argument that pole dancing should be accepted and embraced for its ability to empower women to feel confident and sexy.  Which then begs the question, should women’s feeling of self-confidence and self-empowerment be rooted in the pursuit of feeling sexy? Does wanting to feel sexy, or wanting to be sexy, subordinate women and reinforce an overarching patriarchal culture where the male gaze calls the shots? If the art of the striptease was born out of women seducing men, does pole dancing, even in its most athletic form, sever those ancient ties? Judging from the event I saw in October and my interviews with the competitors, I would say not quite. Seduction was a pervasive element in the choreography of each performance. And that’s probably exactly the point.  Pole Dancing isn’t pure sport.  It isn’t field hockey, or swimming, or gymnastics.  And women do want to feel sexy and attractive, just as men want to feel the same way.  That’s not because of Cosmo or Maxim magazine, it’s because we’re hard-wired to think about sex; we’re pre-built with an overwhelming evolutionary agenda to seek out those who can help us make more copies of ourselves. So take it for what you will.  But no matter your position, you can’t argue the skill and strength involved.  It’s simply astounding.

See the post HERE.

Andrew will be revisiting his college stomping grounds as we hit the Georgetown campus tonight for a presentation on the American Festivals Project.  It’s rainy, rainy, rainy in these parts of Virginia, but we hope people will brave the wet and cold and join us for a fun evening.  The event is sponsored by the Georgetown American Studies department.  Free admission.  Reception to follow!

Click HERE for the Facebook event page.

We hope to see you there!

This is the first time we’ve seen any of our work in print, or at least hanging on a wall.  Although it was only a small representation of our project, we were very excited to hear some positive feedback and see people looking closely at the photographs.  We are now gearing up for our big, all-encompassing show on January 7th in Charlottesville!  More info on that to come.

Elizabeth, Andrew, and Ross at the opening.  My, aren’t those beautiful flowers?

Andrew’s photo from the Dartmouth Polar Plunge was projected on the outside of the gallery with other work from DC Photo Week.  Thank to Gina Martin from NG for snapping this photo!

From our last location on the Bonneville Salt Flats, the AFP made a monumental hike across the vast state of Nevada, stopping only once to photograph a rodeo from afar.  We couldn’t stay long though.  The skies turned dark and threatened to release a mighty wall of rain and lightning.

Our long trek southward put us in Mojave, CA.  On the way, we stopped at the base of Mount Whitney, the tallest mountain in California, and spent a night camping.  We woke to a glorious morning and decided on a hike up to some alpine lakes. That was some frigid water!

In Mojave, we had quite the experience staying with a fellow Couch Surfer named Zach.  Unfortunately though, we never met Zach.  He called the day before we arrived and told us he had to go to a funeral.  But despite not being in town, he let us stay at his house anyways.  Zach rents an old adobe church in downtown Mojave, and has the entire cavernous space to himself!  It proved to be a great home base as we traveled back and forth to California City to shoot Our Lady of the Rock.

The other interesting thing about Zach, as we learned through his lady friend (who was also crashing at the adobe church), was his involvement with the Virgin Galactic spaceship.  It turns out that Zach is the lead wing engineer on the mothership.  Amazing, yes.  Oh, and our roommate at Zach’s just happened to be Sir Richard Branson’s right-hand woman and is responsible for setting up the new airport where these futuristic crafts will soon launch into space.   It’s pretty amazing that this small team of people lives in the dusty desert town of Mojave, CA and is responsible for the future space travel.  (Notice the Chuck Yeager autograph in the photo above!).

The most remarkable part of our conversation was learning how commercial space flight is setting the pace to revolutionize international flights here on earth.  Within our lifetime, commercial flights will travel sub-orbital (where revolution around the earth takes only 90mins) which means we can be in Australia in about an hour.  be able to jump on a plane, launch into the earth’s first ring of orbit, circle around the earth, and re-enter the atmosphere above the desired location.  In other words, instead of taking eighteen hours to fly to Australia, it would only take forty-five minutes.  How far away are we from seeing humans pay for commercial flights to space?  Well, the first flight is scheduled to take off in two years.  Get in line though–there’s already a waiting list with 300 people.

photos courtesy of Virgin Galactic

From Mojave, we drove north through California, stopping at Sequoia National Park where the world’s largest living organism resides…the General Sherman.

After Sequoia National Park, we continued further north to San Francisco.  Before we drove into the heart of the city, we dropped our bags with Jessy and gang at the Rainbow Mansion in Cupertino.  The R.M. is a residence for eight highly educated and technically brilliant people who split rent for the multi-million dollar mansion overlooking Silicon Valley.  Jessy works for NASA and the others are Google engineers and computer wizards.   A french guy was building his own cloud computing company.  Even after a five description of what that actually means, we were still confused.  We’re keeping an eye on these folks because they will probably soon take over the world.

Jesse, host extraordinaire and chef of green beans.

Despite the AFP’s first visit to the West Coast, our experience in San Francisco was short-lived and scenically disappointing.  We spent our only night in San Fran shooting the Drag King competition, and the day after required us to hit the road and make the long trek up to Montana.  As we were leaving town, Andrew suggested we take a small detour to actually see the Pacific Ocean and drive across the Golden Gate Bridge.  We had made it so far–why not add an hour to the trip to see the sights and smell the salty air?

Well, when we left Cupertino, we had clear, blue skies.  However, as soon as we came up the downtown of San Fran, a deep fog enveloped the city.  While crossing the G.G. bridge we could only see a few hundred feet ahead of us!  As we passed the large red towers above our head, we sensed the great Pacific swaying below, but we never actually saw the body of water.  San Fran held true to its stereotype of the foggy city!

We made another epic drive from San Francisco, putting the pedal to the metal while breezing through Nevada, Idaho, and Montana.  No matter the driving shift, we hit road construction in every state.  On one of the windiest and scariest roads that we experienced on the trip, we were stopped at 2am by a ghostly construction worker.  She probably hadn’t talked to anyone in hours, and we became the victims of her life story in the black of the night.

Why was the AFP blazing through the night on the back roads of Montana?  Well, we were headed to Missoula.  This is Andrew’s old stomping ground for two summers, and we were scheduled to meet up with friends and then spend a few days exploring Glacier National Park.

Andrew in front of Ze Fun Haus on Front St where he lived for a summer in 2003.

Homemade ice cream before the 2 hour jaunt from Missoula to West Glacier, MT

Jenna and Buster at Frita’s in West Glacier after a day on the Middle Fork of the Flathead River.

Sally Thompson, Rich Thompson, and Rossaroo at the Glacier Raft Company end-of-the-year party.  Could there be nicer people than the Thompsons?

At Triple Divide Pass in Glacier Nat’l Park.  Water drains to the Gulf, the Pacific, and the Hudson Bay in Canada from this point.

Medicine Grizzly Lake.

Walking the Red Eagle trail through a forest burned in 2006.

Tiny Andrew leaps into a waterfall.

After all that grueling hiking in MT we soaked our bodies in the Goldbug Hotsprings outside Salmon, ID.

Wyoming delivered a fantastic rainbow, which made Buster instantly rip off a herky like she was back in Mississippi cheering on the football team.

In a recent talk at National Geographic live, we commented on how America has some distinctly beautiful places, but one must drive a VERY long way through depressing, poorly-planned, or arid landscapes.  It was very refreshing ending a year-long road trip in such a beautiful place as Glacier National Park.  It redeemed our hope in America.  Let’s take care of the pockets of paradise that still exist across our great country.

What a beautiful farewell to the West and the AFP’s 13 month journey!

This will be a live Twitter event.  You can submit questions for the speakers by directing your tweet to #nglive.

The event also has a FACEBOOK page!

That’s right.  Drag kings, not drag queens.  As the AFP drove from the arid landscape of Southern California and headed towards greener pastures, we brainstormed about what kind of event to document in the infamous city of San Francisco.  The hilly city is known for all types of notable things: Alcatraz, Bay to Breakers, Techy computer parties, Chinatown, and a large LGBT community.  We decided to focus on the latter, only because our Google searching led us to a wonderful event that we just had to check out.

The San Francisco Drag King competition is in its 14th year, and claims to be the largest of its kind in the world.  The AFP showed up before the event and set up a portrait studio in the second floor balcony.   We watched from above as a number of drag kings strutted their stuff and showed off their talents in the steep competition to become the King of em’ all.  We scouted the crowd and asked people up to our photo backdrop for a little portrait action.  And action there was!  This bunch was ready to party!  Let’s just say that there were a few photos that we could not show on this site.

There wasn’t much more to the evening in terms of what we could photograph, so we’ve stuck to showing you our best portraits.  We are very grateful to the organizers of the event who allowed us to come in and take portraits.  We were warmly welcomed and appreciated the hospitality from Fog City.  Here’s to Drag King 2010!

“I think we passed the turnoff.”  As Andrew uttered these words, I realized how many times I had heard the statement during our year of driving 45,000 miles around the United States.  This time, however, Andrew and I were neither in a city nor a suburb.  We were deep in the heart of the Mojave desert, and we were, literally, lost.

We had driven 25 minutes north of Mojave, California, searching for a Catholic religious gathering in the middle of the desert.  The location we were hoping to find was called Our Lady of the Rock, where Mary is said to appear on the 13th of every month.  There is no local church connected to OLOTR, no directions online, and when we asked around town, virtually no one had heard of what we described.

After days of searching for directions, we finally struck a chord when getting the oil changed at Valvoline.  I just happened to ask an attendant if he had heard of the mysterious Catholic gathering in the middle of the desert, and by chance he had!  He and his friend had taken dirt bikes out to the site, where they discovered three crosses that stood in the middle of the desert.  All we had to do was go straight on this certain road, and then look for a water treatment plant.  What–water out in the middle of the Mojave desert!?  I was afraid we were doomed.

A beacon in the desert for lost photographers.

Turning down a dirt road that eventually became deep pits of sand, Andrew and I knew we had gone the wrong way.  The Champe Champ, our newly-acquired Ford Focus station wagon, did not have the four-wheel power action that the Dodge Lodge once delivered.  It was 10:15 AM, and we were late, hot, and frustrated by being lost in a place that threatened a slow and painful death by dehydration or mutant lizards.

After turning around and continuing on what felt like the correct road, we found a remote ranger station. A gentleman appeared from behind a trailer and pointed us in the right direction.  “Oh yeah, Our Lady of the Rock.  Those Catholic people get together every month.  Just down the road another two miles, then turn left.  You can’t miss it.”  We were relieved to have found our way.  It was 10:30 AM, and we drove the Champe Champ like a bandit out of hell.

Surprisingly, the scene at OLOTR was more subdued than what we expected.  As we watched people setting up tents and a sound system, it was clear that we had made it in plenty of time.  Looking around, and noting the barren landscape and general proximity to nothing at all, I thought that we may have already experienced a small miracle in finding the location.  Back where the men were setting up the sound system, a small wooden structure marked the center of the gathering.  Attached to a white picket fence were dozens of colorful streamers that marked the enclosure.  Inside the structure sat a statue of the Virgin Mary, surrounded by flowers.  This was clearly the altar, or center of the service, where something–but what we did not know–would take place.

Ross adroitly inserts himself front and center into the ceremony.

The origins of OLOTR date back to 1989, when Maria Paula, a mother of six children, was praying fervently for one of her daughters who had fallen ill to leukemia.  Maria Paula drove out to the desert, and was praying in a canyon.  At 5:00 one morning, Maria was suddenly enveloped by a white fog and she heard the sound of birds and smelled the sweet aroma of a garden.  A woman appeared within the cloud of white, with a rosary in her hands.

She said, “I am your Lady of the Rock, Queen of Peace of Southern California.  I come to bring you the peace and love that is so needed.  I will visit the homes, and I will form one family for the service of the Lord, Our God.  I will form an army, and we will work together.  I will bring my angel from faraway lands.  In him you will confide and tell all that I am indicating to you.  Go in the peace of God.”

Maria Paula emerges with her entourage in some seriously hip shades.

To this day, Maria Paula returns to the desert on the 13th of every month to receive a message from the Virgin Mary.  Throngs of supporters and miracle-expectant spectators drive from hours away to take part in a rosary service and receive blessings from Maria Paula.  Over the years, Maria has gathered a following, but it’s hard to determine why OLOTR has turned into such a phenomenon.  Most gatherings attract 200-300 people, but when the 13th falls on a Saturday or Sunday,  2,000-3,000 people descend upon that barren spot in the middle of the desert.  Apart from the general public, Maria’s following includes several other women who travel with her to OLOTR.  Like Maria Paula, they are dressed like nuns. However, it’s not certain that the women, or Maria, are actual Catholic nuns.  Due to the official response from the Catholic church, it’s very likely that they are not.

The Associated Press reports, “Catholic authorities have officially suggested there is no Mary at Our Lady of the Rock. After more than a year of investigating, they found it to be due to somebody’s imagination, not anyone’s bad will. The diocese in Fresno, which has immediate authority over California City, has concurred with Los Angeles officials, but has placed no restrictions on people gathering at the site.”

Most folks are there to pray but hardly anyone (including the boy on the left) can resist a snapshot of the sun when the moment calls.

Despite the position of the Catholic authorities, thousands of faithful believers return each month seeking blessings and healings from Maria Paula.  People also flock to OLOTR hoping to see their own vision of the Virgin Mary.   The format of this has taken an interesting form.  Instead of looking for the Virgin Mary with their own eyes, these religious spectators come with polaroid and digital cameras, snapping away at the sun in hopes of seeing Her appear in their photo.  It’s unclear how this phenomenon was started, but someone must have taken a picture of the sun at some point, spotted the Virgin Mary in their photo, and showed it off to everyone at the event.  Now it seems to be the norm.

Behind the main structure, under a large tailgate-style tent, we met a family who had traveled three hours to come to OLOTR. The parents had first come to OLOTR before anyone knew about it and they spoke of their first sighting of the Virgin Mary.  Two storm clouds blew in from opposite directions and when they converged, the clouds split, a bright light appeared, and the Virgin was standing within the clouds.  They said everyone there saw it.  Even little kids were pointing up in the air and saying, “Look, the Virgin Mary!”

The parents now return with their son and daughter-in-law almost every month.   The entire family comes to witness potential miracles and wait for visions of the Virgin Mary.  They were eager to talk about their experiences and the holiness of the site.

An OLOTR faithful holds up a print of a photograph where clouds resemble St. Francis and a dove at his fingertips.

But this family was not the only one claiming miracles at OLOTR.  Even the construction workers, who were building a grotto on the site, were converted believers.  They told us about the first time they visited the site with Maria Paula to spec the job.  As they were approaching the site of the grotto, Maria Paula stopped, knelt down on the ground with her other sisters, and looked up at the sky.  The two men followed her gaze, and saw streams of gold light descending upon the head of Maria Paula.  They claimed it was a miracle, and since then, other kinds of miraculous things have happened on the job site.  When the two men told us their stories, their eyes were wide with wonder, and they could hardly hold back their smiles.  Truly, these men had witnessed something miraculous.

Andrew and I heard a great number of stories that day.  From healings to prophecies to sightings of the Virgin Mary.  But our experience that day was rather un-miraculous–if that’s a word.  We witnessed the rosary service, the procession of a statue of Christ, the blessings by Maria Paula, and people taking pictures of the sun.  But the only thing out of the ordinary was one woman who broke out in loud cries during the service, and had to be taken to the back of the group.  She might have been overcome by the Holy Spirit, but she may also have been struggling with some serious issues.  Or possibly, she was overcome by the heat.  We were, remember, in the middle of the Mojave desert, at midday.

Andrew gave his best shot at finding the Virgin Mary with his Nikon. We don’t see her…do you?

The AFP certainly isn’t trying to disprove OLOTR.  But as journalists, we report what we see.  And for someone who has grown up in church, the events we witnessed that day were not foreign, or even bizarre.  Had we hoped to see more excitement, more drama, and more people?  Yes, certainly.  We wished we could have come back the following month to see the crowds and a potential sighting, but the AFP had more miles to cover.  We encourage you to make the journey out there and witness it yourself.  If you do decide to go, we can help you with the directions.

Our Lady of the Rock from American Festivals Project on Vimeo.

The next time you get into your car, grab the steering wheel and give a good look at the speedometer.  Let your eyes travel up from zero, climbing double digit numbers that are so familiar.  But keep going.  Don’t stop at 80.  Don’t stop at 90 or 100.  Notice if your palms are getting sweaty or if you start to twitch in your seat.  Is this unfamiliar territory…staring at the notch for 120 or 140mph?  Think to yourself, what is the fastest I have ever driven this vehicle?  Scale your eyes back to the fastest you’ve ever pushed that needle, and then think about that brief  exhilirating moment, as quick as it may have been.  Ask yourself why didn’t you go faster than that?  How long did you sustain that top speed?  Why didn’t you drive further?  Now, if I told you there’s a place as flat as a sheet of college-ruled paper, where there are no cops, no traffic signals, no turns, no intersections, no on-coming traffic, and no speed-limit, would you push that accelerator as far as it could go for as long as you could?  Of course you would.  And that could only mean you were in one special place–the Bonneville Salt Flats in western Utah.

Utah is known for radical religious piety.  And the shores of the Great Salt Lake seem to be where there’s the best action.  To the east, there’s Salt Lake City, the Mormon temple, and one out of every two persons who believe in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  To the west, on the ancient western shore of Lake Bonneville, where the briny water has totally evaporated, there’s another kind of fantacism, another object of devotion, where 1 out of every 1 persons is a believer.  Service doesn’t meet every week, and not everyone follows the same scriptures.  But they share the same faith; faith in the divinity of…Speed!  For the past 61 years they’ve all been coming here to this sacred house of worship where the ground is as white as the clouds of heaven to push their earthly extremes in pursuit of the holy.

The world land speed record is exactly as it sounds: the record for the fastest achievement by any wheeled vehicle on land.  The current record holder is a 47yr old British navy pilot named Andy Green, who achieved supersonic speed of 763mph in Utah in 1997, and who is now working on breaking the 1,000mph barrier.  Speedweek, however, is not when Andy Green and his ultra-rare competition push speeds that top the sound barrier.  We got a tip that the land speed record attempts happen privately, on a date later in the summer.  Instead, Speedweek is the annual gathering of the tribe, where speed devotees make an annual pilgrimage to the fastest racetrack in the world and put their best effort against history.  There is no head-to-head racing, there is no stopwatch.  (There is also no best costume award or recognition for cheapest looking girlfriend.)  Drivers are racing against history–the historical speed precedent set for that engine class.  The attention is purely on getting the cars to run at top speed.  Everything else is secondary.  If Sturgis left us short on horsepower, we found all the RPM’s we could handle in the desolate, otherworldly, evaporated ruins of the Great Salt Lake Basin.

Andrew begins sewing on the AFP portable studio backdrop made of 2×4’s, oversized bed sheets, and rope.

Our first model in the studio, Joshua Burke and his modified RX-7 purple dragon

We quickly abandoned the studio backdrop for obvious reasons.

The intensity of the ultraviolet rays reflecting off the ground is so intense that the AFP broke out in an itchy rash type of sun poisoning called Polymorphic Light Eruption.

There are three courses at Bonneville: the long-course, the short-course, and the special course.  Each of them are essentially a straight line marked by black paint.  The long-course is for the fastest of the entrants with 5 miles of speed guns and 3 official miles of room to slow down and turn out.  The short course and special course only track speeds for the first 3 miles so this is the more common course for motorcycles and cars not trying to break records.  For each, there is one starting line and no preset order to lineup, it’s a first come first served system and the wait is usually an hour or more.  This is where spectators can get up close to the cars and if there is a social scene during the day, this is the closest thing to it.  But the mood and vibe around the starting line is respectful, even subdued.  Certainly, the heat and extreme sunlight reflecting off the white ground has everyone rationing their energy output.  More to the point though, there is a shared understanding for the danger of each ride and the potential for a fatal crash or engine blowing incident that would erase everything.  With an invisible gust of wind, a sticky spot in the salt, an improper mix of fuel and air, or any other unforeseen variable, so much can go wrong in a hurry.  Towards 6pm on our second day at Bonneville, a 46yr old driver from California, who was sitting in for his dad, passed the 5mile marker and then unexpectantly began cartwheeling down the track.  When all the pieces finally fell to the ground, it looked like a bomb had exploded under the chassis.  There’s a photograph and story in the Salt Lake Tribue.  The photo below is what we saw when we arrived on the scene.  It was the only photograph we got before we were run out under some very tense circumstances.  The driver was reported dead on the way to the hospital, though it’s unlikely he survived the crash.

Death is not a common outcome for any of the festivals and competitions the AFP has covered.  Injuries yes, but fatalities no.  Buckraoos get bucked, gymnasts sprain a wrist, snake catchers get bit, hipsters get too drunk, lumberjacks get splinters, breyerfans get hysterical, but that’s been the extent of it so far.  Perhaps this is the reason Speedweek felt the least like a party.  To be sure, the scene is loose and there’s plenty of good times coming out of Bonneville.  But there is a precision and underlying focus on exactitude that dominates the culture of the salt flats racing.  Bonneville is a break from all the other distractions.  It’s a time to concentrate purely on your car.  It’s a week of adjusting and studying and listening and head-scratching and readjusting and trying again and again.  There is an internal discipline that seems self govern and regulate the pulse of Speedweek.  There is too much at stake to goof around and be bothered by corporate giveaway parties and mid-day raffles.  Think of Bonneville more as a mad scientist laboratory and Speedweek as less of a festival and more of a rite of passage.  It is a place where there is no finish in sight.  A place for endless tinkering and trial. And ultimately a place where limits are set only by the failure of imagination.

Speedweek was one of the most far-out events we experienced in our year on the road.  Many thanks to Catherine Dee who tipped us off to this awesome event and offered the extra bed in Wendover.  Thanks to Josh Burke for giving us the inside scoop on Bonneville history and letting the AFP tag along in the push vehicle.  Thanks also to the Dripps team from Cville for welcoming us into their operation.  We also owe a big thanks to all the drivers who let us photograph them at the end of their race, against the saltscape background, as they waited for the push vehicles to chase them down and haul them back so they could do it all over again.

Charlottesville’s fastest faculty!

Bonneville Speed Week from American Festivals Project on Vimeo.

South Dakota is not a heavily populated state.  In fact, it’s one of the least populous states in the union, ranking 46 out of 51 (including Washington DC).  The biggest city in South Dakota is Sioux Falls, which at 155,000 persons ranks 150th on the list of biggest cities in the USA (this is 54x smaller than #1 NYC).  But there are a lot of people in this country that love motorcycles, and every first week of August a whole heck of a lot them ride out to the land of Mt. Rushmore and George Custer to gawk, strut, rev, ride, and revel.  In 2000, the attendance of the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally was so large that it equaled roughly the size of the 15th largest US city, Austin, TX (twice the size of Minneapolis, MN for perspective) with 754,844 persons.  For 2009, the numbers wouldn’t be quite so high, although lewd t-shirt sales were probably at an all-time best as this year marked the 69th anniversary of the Black Hills Rally.  If there’s one thing a journalist needs when heading into Sturgis, it’s a sense of humor.  And while the AFP was not prepared for the likes of Sturgis, by the end, we were pretty sure that Sturgis was one of the silliest gatherings we could possibly have attended.

Don’t worry, the silly aspect was a shock to us too.  Especially after we tried crashing the Hells Angels summer reunion ride the week before in Duluth, MN and were basically told we’d get our lights knocked out if we didn’t scram.  “We don’t come to your family reunions and take pictures of your girlfriends” was one of the more amicable responses we got in Duluth.  It’s exactly that rebel spirit and outlaw culture that seems so quintessentially American that we wanted to photograph and capture.  If America stands for anything it’s freedom, and nothing embodies the symbol of American freedom quite like a motorcycle being ridden across the open prairie by a wind-hardened, leather-skinned, gristle-faced working class dude.  Bikers are our modern-day cowboys.  In an era where the horse has been replaced by the combustion engine, these are the people who ride in the saddle, wear leather chaps, feel the air against their face, and sacrifice comfort and expediency for the pursuit of a more wholesome and pure experience.  Picture the alternative: an overworked disheveled computer programmer zoned out in iPod land squeezed into a packed-to-the-gills rush-hour subway train.  That’s not an image likely to be adopted to symbolize a country that values courage, fortitude, patriotism, liberty, and freedom.  For better or for worse, rebel archetypes in America are still an important part of our national identity.

But it’s hard being a rebel all the time.  The yard needs mowing.  The kids need a ride back and forth from soccer, tennis, football, ballet, french lessons, therapy, and sleepovers.  The 9-5 grind wears you out so bad that you’re too tired to get much done on the weekend.  Car payments.  House payments.  Insurance payments.  Where can a person go to cut loose from all these obligations and really let their hair down?  What kind of place will finally let a person go wild?

Enter Sturgis. It’s basically anything goes for two solid weeks in Sturgis around the time of the rally.  All the beer, boobs, butts, brats, bros, and bacchanalia you can handle.  It’s Easy Rider by day and Mad Max by night.  Ride hard. Party hard.  It’s where weekend warriors come to recharge their batteries for a full solid year.  And it’s living proof that America still has some of that old stock left in it, that frontier DNA is still churning.

Or you could hang around a few days and come around to the inevitable but sad conclusion that Sturgis is, for the most part, a giant costume party.  And the theme every year, again and again, is “rebel outlaw.”  So don’t even bother to walk out your tent flap or hotel lobby unless some part of your body is adorned with black leather, a skull on flames, an eagle, a Harley logo, a cross, barbed wire, the words “freedom” or “hell” written somewhere.  And of course, bear all your tattoos.  Make sure your shirt doesn’t have sleeves.  Don’t be bashful about showing off chest hair.  Sunglasses are a must.  Jeans are encouraged.  Jeans with black leather chaps over them are celebrated.  And some kind of hat or bandanna is totally accepted.  If you don’t have any, not to worry, there are about 4,127 different t-shirt and vendor stands happily standing by ready to sell you all of your regalia needs.

Discoveries are good.  Epiphanies are better.  And the only way we could stick it out in Sturgis was to accept that we had been duped.  We had shown up to photograph something pure and found it absolutely watered down and generic and commercialized.  But we were just as guilty as our fellow costumers in seeking out that classic American archetype.  We were in pursuit of exactly the kind of thing that everyone else was there to find.  Everyone wanted to rub elbows with the ghosts of freedom: physical, moral, aesthetic, and even emotional liberation.  That Bud Light, Harley Davidson, State Farm, Pepsi, Jack Daniels, Aerosmith, and a huge economic engine was there to facilitate the entire operation only reinforced how distant we are from our rebel forebears.  And with that epiphany we saw Sturgis for what it was and photographed it as it should be photographed…as a humorous and funny and outlandish anomaly.  So enjoy the pictures.  They aren’t in our normal style.  If there’s one photographer who excels in these situations it is British photographer Martin Parr and he was an inspiration for sure.

Lastly, it should be said that everything written above is a generalization.  This was our main take-away from the event–our overall impression.  We know for sure that not everyone who attended Sturgis fits this characterization.  The Hells Angels do go to Sturgis every year.  The Bandidos too.  And for plenty, riding motorcycles is an everyday affair and even a major social influence on their lives.  In particular, we spent the better part of our last day with the Royal Ras from Albuquerque, NM, a rastafarian motorcycle club.  We followed behind them on the way to Mt. Rushmore and hung out with them in their hotel room.  We wanted to meet and ride with a club and break away from the pageantry of the main strip.  They were newcomers to Sturgis just like we were.  Where we had come to Sturgis seeking out an American subculture, they had come to purely for their love of riding motorcycles.  It reminded us of the true reason why hundreds of thousandths of riders descend on Sturgis every year.  Despite the costume party, may Sturgis live long, and live hard. Many thanks to the guys and gal from Royal Ras for sharing their time and insights with us.

]]> http://americanfestivalsproject.net/2009/09/28/sturgis-motorcycle-rally-sturgis-sd/feed/ 2 http://americanfestivalsproject.net/2009/09/04/pine-ridge-pow-wow/ http://americanfestivalsproject.net/2009/09/04/pine-ridge-pow-wow/#comments Fri, 04 Sep 2009 06:48:51 +0000 Ross http://americanfestivalsproject.net/?p=608

There are probably plenty of folks out there who would debate whether South Dakota is part of the “West.”  The Rockies don’t run through it.  It’s name doesn’t conjure up an image of cowboys. It’s basically on the same longitudinal coordinates as Nebraska.  And Nebraska is not the “West.”  Right?  But South Dakota — it feels Western.  You can sense that something is on the other side. The state is like a dinner bell, telling you to wash up for a supper of hearty mountains and quenching rivers.  And when the corn fields end at the precipice leading into the badlands it becomes all too clear that the stitching on the national hem has busted loose.  “Be prepared for the unfamiliar,” it should say, because that’s what you get a few hundred miles past the Missouri River when unrivaled kitsch meets sacred native lands.

Ross demonstrates the inverted back-flip at the Boys and Girls Club for the photo workshop students.

The world’s tallest prairie dog statue.  A giant angry smoke breathing T-Rex.  Cups of coffee for a nickel.  Wild buffalo herds.  Moon-like topography.  Expansive grasslands.  Chinese tourists.  Fleets of RVs.  Indian reservations.  All of it becomes a big jumble of gaping contrasts around the Black Hills of South Dakota. And in no place was this more evident than in Pine Ridge, in the southwest corner of South Dakota, on one of the poorest Indian reservations in the country.

Pine Ridge is a community that knows poverty unlike almost any other zip code in America, not to mention diabetes, teenage pregnanacy, gang violence, and alcoholism.  In the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, Pine Ridge stands out as a great exception.  Running water and electricity are absent from a huge number of homes.  Families are broken as frequently as windows.  And in twenty years, one woman told us nothing had changed except for the new Subway. So it was with a certain degree of trepidation that we arrived on the “res.”  Being two young white males from Virginia with big cameras around our neck, we knew we would stick out. And we did.  But it led to one of the greatest experiences of the trip.

Ben Smith at the end of our epic weekend.

As it turned out, where we entered as isolated strangers, we left invigorated by new friendships, the warmth of the people at Pine Ridge, and the intimate tour of the traditions of the Oglalla tribe.  In a single day, we participated in a sweat lodge ritual, viewed a sundance ceremony, witnessed the wildest display of horse races, and photographed the evening session of the Pow Wow.  We owe tremendous gratitude to Ben and Diane Smith who offered their front yard to two young homeless strangers and then showed us a day we will never forget.  Thanks also to James Rhodes whose idea it was for us come to Pine Ridge to join him in photographing the Pow Wow.

As you’ll see in this post, we diverged a little from our customary documentary style approach to dabble in portraiture.  It would have been too painful to leave Pine Ridge without portraits of these men and women in beautiful “regalia.”  So on a hot too-sunny-to-get-good-pictures afternoon, we pulled in participants after they finished a competition and asked them to stand for us.  We’re thrilled with the results from our makeshift studio.  And it also gave us a chance to meet and talk with lots of different people who had traveled from different states to compete.  In fact, the entire element of competition was something we hadn’t forseen.  But we weren’t surprised; prize money is a common theme among the events we attend.  Just like at the rodeo or the Lumberjack games, Pow Wows offer prize money for different categories, and so most participants are moving week to week to a new location on the circuit.  And the tug of tradition and family heritage is an equally important aspect along with the money.  But just like so many other festivals we’ve covered, it’s unclear if prize money will be enough to keep these traditions alive.  On the Pine Ridge reservation, fewer and fewer of the younger generation are speaking Lakota.  Basketball is far more popular year round than native dancing.  And traditional garb is worn far more infrequently than contemporary urban labels.  In an era of surging wealth for Indian communities who are distancing from their past and profiting from casinos and natural resource extraction, it’s unclear how Pine Ridge will evolve and transform, if ever.  For the time being, it is a community close to its history, and struggling, just as the rest of the US does, with how to hold onto the past as it moves into a new and unpredictable future.

Pine Ridge Pow Wow from American Festivals Project on Vimeo.

Friends,

We’ve been in the woods and on the road too much to post.  But that doesn’t mean we haven’t been busy!  Good stuff is on the way.  Even though we are driving back East, we still have five more big posts to share with you from the West.  On the list is a pow-wow from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, the Sturgis motorcycle rally, the Bonneville salt flats Speed Week, “Our Lady of the Rock” Virgin Mary experience in the Mohave Desert, and the San Francisco Drag King competition!  Stay tuned!

Here are ten photos from our night. Five color frames from Ross, and five black and white from Andrew.

2009 World Lumberjack Competition from American Festivals Project on Vimeo.