A WORLD ON TWO WHEELS

Article by Claude Marthaler

The bicycle is the most universal vehicule on earth. Bikes transcend political and geographical borders, climate zones, family generations and social class. They unite people at all levels of physical ability. Used everywhere for transportations of goods ans people, for business deliveries, and not long ago still used by the military, cicling is at once a sport, a form of transport and a vehicule for artistic expression. Cycling, far more any other means of motion, such as, for example, swimming, has become second nature for humans. The bike is now literaly a Laufmachine-the machine equivalent of walking-just as it was named by his original inventor. Has the author Henry Miller once suggested, it is simply “Man’s best friend”. His publisher wasn’t convinced, and added in exasperation “ His bike was such a good friend he all but sleep with it”
A bicycle allows a child to develop the essential notions of life, both as an individual and as a part of wider society. It brings into play seed, balance, and links place and people, actions and consequences. In the world of cycling can be found much of the interplay that an infant must comprehend to become an adult. It allows adults, too, to retain a little of their own inner child.
As such, the bicycle experts a fascination for many onlookers, and many have struggled to express the universality and appeal of the two-wheeled wonder. Among them is Bruno Sananès, a French photographer born in 1963.
In 1994 he started to take pictures of “all bicycles” All? “A lifetime’s project”, he explained. His objective is not just to celebrate the bicycle, but to express, through the eye of a bicycle, the planet and all its diversity. Each empty slice between two spokes is like a camera’s shutter: opening and closing in precise harmony, capturing a social situation, or simply offering space for the imagition to fill the gap.
Astonishingly he is not a particuclar keen cyclist himself, but his dedication is no less than some of the heroes of the cycle racing world. With the systematic approach of a collector, with the yearning for beauty of someone in love with bikes, and with his photographer’s eye, he has created a personal and unique “world of bicycles”: not a static or statistical report, but a lively reportage of one of man’s most familiar objects.

UNITY FROM TWO WHEELS

His work offers a powerful sensation of unity, reflecting perhaps the unfathomable unity of humanity itself. Bruno’s pictures show that each kind of bicycle or rickshaw serves a particuclar, local purpose; each is taken in its environment, with differing quality of roads, of air, of temperature, of landscape, and amid different paces of lifestyle – but all with one unique motor: man’s legs. A bicycle is nothing without a cyclist and vice versa. A bicycle, like the road, brings you always to a man.
The bicycle may have been a European invention, but its presence is today clearly far more various and numerous in the southern hemisphere. A huge genealogical tree of two or three wheelers has flourished there: rickshaws, becaks, san lun che, triciclos, side-cars, trishaws, and so on. Passangers and goods can be taken in the front, at the back, or on the side of these heavy-duty wood and metal workhorses. One’s of Bruno pictures shows a rickshaw carrying a broken motorbike…
Globlisation brings not only worldwide standardisation of bicycles, for example the 26th MTB wheel diameter (a boon for any “cyclonaut” or globe-trotting cycle traveller) but an inexorable “fuite en avant” – the march of progress. Despite the fact that many riders and their families make a living from the existance of rickshaws, governments of third world countries consider these human-powered vehicule as the symbol of underdevelopment. Add to this the invasion of the free market and urban public spaces are changing dramatically. The bicycle and tricycles captured by Bruno’s work are simply disapearing, perhaps for ever.
So his regular and quantitative work becomes, year by year, ever more valuable as a historical record. A single concept -the bicycle- can caracterise and personalise the world, brings it closer, and allow you to explore all, from childhood to your old age, from your hometown to, if you wish, the entire world. Yet the common thread -bicycles- from across this wide canvas has probably never before been psysically and visually united as in Bruno’s images.