Damn stoked to see our good buddy Qball made the cover of the Baltimore City Paper a couple years back. He has worked his ass off to become the great photographer that he is and has the journal entries of stories mentally logged to talk on at any given time. If you ever get a chance to see Qball at a run, rally or just milling about waiting for miscreants to enter stage right, shoot the shit with him as he is as genuine as they come and most of all is a true rider.
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| Doug Barber aka Qball, featured in the Baltimore City Paper for his photography |
Motorcycle Diary
Doug Barber captured old-school biker life through his camera's lens
"Doug
Barber never set out to publish a book. In fact, sitting in the park at
the foot of Broadway in Fells Point outside his former house, he
appears downright nervous about sharing his story. Perhaps it's not
surprising for someone who has lived much of his life quietly and on the
edge of the grid.
A professional corporate photographer by trade,
Barber has been in hard-core motorcycle clubs (please, don't ever call
them "gangs") much of his life, using his camera to record the
rough-and-tumble lifestyle. By being a part of what bikers call "the
life," he had unprecedented access to a notoriously camera-shy
population. Earlier this year, Barber self-published a collection of his
photographs, coupled with verses by poet Edward Pliska, aka "Sorez the
Scribe," entitled living the life, one man's perspective inside what
Barber refers to as "the old-school biker's world."
"It's a
collection of personal statements not meant to explain or justify the
biker existence," Barber says. "Those who find inspiration and solace
living outside society's conventions will take this book to heart."
Barber, who goes by Q-Ball in the biker world,
started to step out of the boundaries of societal norms as a military
brat living in Okinawa where his stepfather was stationed in the 1960s.
"I was the red-headed stepchild," he says. "There's a
lot to being a red head that people don't understand. You're treated a
certain way and because you are you get pushed in a certain direction. I
became an outlaw of sorts at that time of my life. And motorcycles were
the quintessential status symbol of being an outlaw."
He was 16 when he bought his first motorcycle, a
Honda. He loved the freedom--and the fear. "Anything that would
intimidate me I'd come at head on," he says. "Even today there's aspects
of riding a motorcycle that are frightening and once you survive it,
the feeling is probably the same as bungee jumping or sky diving."
Though
he was never a malicious kid, Barber was always in trouble. A high
school teacher in Okinawa saw some promise in him and helped to get him a
scholarship to the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he found
photography and his wife, who he's been with since 1976. Shortly
thereafter, he was asked to photograph the funeral for a member of a
major motorcycle club, which began Barber's slow and cautious
integration into "the life," with his Nikon in hand.
Barber looks as
much like Santa Claus as he does a biker and is just as gentle. Now his
thick flowing beard is more white than red. He's raised two daughters
and abided by his non-biker wife's one request of no tattoos. Some of
his friends from his club have passed away. Those that remain encouraged
him to publish his photographs. In 2006, Hot Bike Japan found his
photos on the internet and asked Barber to create a year's worth of
covers and a calendar. More press followed and the pressure increased to
publish a book.
Ever one to defy authority, Barber turned down an
unfavorable publishing deal. Then he fortuitously met Richard
Gohlinghorst of Ridge Printing when he snapped his picture at a
motorcycle event. Gohlinghorst had launched a design and publishing
venture called Lowside Syndicate. Barber got Sorez on board and living
the life self-published in January.
To choose the photos for the book Barber sent a large
collection to Sorez (based in New Jersey) who matched his poems or
created original works to go with the images. "This brought me back to a
simpler time," Sorez says by phone; he's been in the life over 30 years
and is part of a club called "The Highway Poets." "Back then, as long
as you had a motor, a frame, and wheels, you'd build [a bike] and ride
it. The people were real. It brought me back to being younger."
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| Doug Barber Photography © 2012 |
Barber confesses that he is drawn to seedy subject
matter, which abounds in the biker culture. The photos begin in 1972 and
are predominantly taken in Baltimore, including shots of one-time owner
of the Cat's Eye Pub, Kenny Orye (now deceased), and swap meets on
Eastern Avenue. The images are raw, in black-and-white, sometimes
grainy. There's plenty of booze, boobs, bushy beards, and lots of ink.
Flipping through the book you can feel the dirt in your mouth and smell
gasoline.
In a photo coupled with the verse "No Other Way," a
group of bikers gather around a campfire in a muddy lot surrounded by
scrubby trees. They look cold and tired and dirty. Barber looks at that
and explains that it was trips like this, when he and his buddies spent
days riding with no money sleeping on the side of the road, that gave
his club its name.
"We went into a Harley-Davidson shop to get some
coffee and the owner saw us and said, 'Here comes dirt that moves,'"
Barber recalls. The club took Dirt That Moves as its name and set up a
clubhouse on Falls Road near the Baltimore Polytechnic Institute.
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| Doug Barber Photography © 2012 |
Barber explains that bikers live life as if on
steroids, doing everything from laughing to drinking in extreme. He says
that the first thing club members did when they stopped riding for the
day was to break out the booze, if for no other reason than to work out
the aches and pains from hours of riding. That is recorded in images and
words in "Name Your Poison," where a visibly blitzed couple stagger
into the frame while a disembodied hand offers them a cigarette from
outside the camera's lens.
Barber is adamant that he wanted to record the biker
lifestyle without sensationalism. "It's not glorification and it's not
judgment," he says. "This isn't a group of animals in a cage for your
viewing pleasure."
A book about the motorcycle lifestyle would not be
complete without touching on the mostly mutual disdain between bikers'
and police officers. Barber won't deny that some of the bad reputation
bikers get is legitimate. "In the '70s, half the fun was getting in a
fight," he says. "But fighting was different back then. You mostly
fought with your hands and the loser bought everyone beer."
He had his share of police run-ins, particularly when
he'd try to take photographs when the police would stop his club, a
frequent occurrence. Trying to explain the relationship between bikers
and cops is complicated. Barber says that many bikers end up in trouble
with the law because the system pushes them around until they lash out
against it. He says the "love of a good woman" and his camera kept him
from falling entirely off the outlaw precipice. "I'm not saying all cops
are bad and all bikers are good," he says. "In every organization you
have the good, the bad, and the ugly. I've found through life that if
you treat someone with respect, that's what you'll get back."
Generally, bikers take to the road because they want
to be left alone. Many of the photographs and poems in the book
underscore the freedom and solitude of the lone rider as much as the
brotherhood of clubs. The cover photo says it all: "Ricky," the
president of Dirt That Moves, popping his sidecar up and out of the
waves at Daytona Beach with the glee of a child.
It's a lifestyle that, once begun, is not a weekend
hobby or something to walk away from. "I try to live my life by a code I
have for myself, to be true to myself, give and get respect, and never
take anything for granted, to live in the moment," Sorez says. His
favorite photo (joined with the poem, "Road to Redemption") of a
solitary rider looking pensively into the distance on a cold, wet winter
day encompasses everything he loves about the life.
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| Doug Barber Photography © 2012 |
"This is a 24-7 lifestyle," Sorez says. "I don't just
go out on a nice weekend, put on my leathers, and have a nice ride. I'm
out there when it's 19 degrees out, when it's pouring out, when it's
hot out. Basically out there living the life."
A photo of a man
called "Righteous John," a surly looking dude holding a nub of a
cigarette in his huge paw in his grease-covered shop, demonstrates what
Barber wanted to capture in the book. "I knew that shops wouldn't look
like this forever," he says. However, there is a photo taken more
recently of a more pleasant-looking guy working on a bike in his own,
modern shop. It's this demographic, in addition to the old-school
brothers, who are buying up living the life, a new generation of young
riders resurrecting the old ways of tinkering with their own bikes.
That's exemplified in the final photograph of the
book that depicts a young boy on a big wheel surrounded by motorcycles,
grinning at the camera and giving it the finger. "That kid is about 30
years old now and rides a motorcycle," Barber says. He contemplates the
image and adds, wistfully, "Ah . . . another generation of degenerates."
