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Bike Week at Daytona Beach
When photojournalist and writer Roby Page first started trekking to Daytona Beach, Florida, for Bike Week in 1985, the counterculture gathering was dominated by rogues, ruffians, and rebels. Now the leather-clad biker rumbling down Atlantic Avenue might be a doctor or a lawyer. More than a half-million enthusiasts arrive at Daytona Beach every March, a number swelled by new bikers from the American mainstream.
In Bike Week at Daytona Beach: Bad Boys and Fancy Toys, Page sets out on his Harley-Davidson to search for what it really means to be a biker. Part memoir, part narrative history, and part photo essay, the book not only chronicles Bike Week, but also vividly documents the evolution of two American icons—the Harley and the biker.
Braving wintry weather on his way to sunny Florida, Page gives us an understanding of the visceral, even elemental thrills of traveling by motorcycle. He tracks the history of the outlaw biker image from its origins in the wake of World War II and the parallel history of the Harley-Davidson Motor Company, creator of the machine favored by bikers. Arriving in Daytona Beach, the author shares the changing carnival of Bike Week through his prose and through black-and-white photographs. Finally, Page joins long-time bikers Jinks and Wolfpup to get perspective on how Bike Week has changed and on how the dramatic increase in new bikers has transformed their culture forever.
The photographs are by far the most compelling aspect of this book, which chronicles Page’s own motorcycle journey to Daytona Beach for the annual Bike Week. While the photos all but jump off the page, the text, like a bike in need of a tune-up, takes time to get warmed up: the first chapter, which recounts Page’s riding through cold weather and having his Harley break down, reads like a misfire when compared to the lively, chaotic Daytona scenes he describes in later chapters. The book focuses largely on how Bike Week has changed; the event was ‘in disrepute’ during the ’60s, and ’70s, but Daytona, by the late ’80s, made peace with annual invasion, hanging welcome banners, for instance, beginning in 1988. Municipally blessed or not, Bike Week is swollen with bikers of all stripes—the leather-clad, facial-tattoo-having, beer-guzzling brawlers and the just as fearsome looking Christian bikers—and Page’s photos capture them all, though the accompanying captions are minimally informative. Still, for motorcycle enthusiasts or those with a morbid curiosity about what really goes on at bike rallies, the book is a welcome look at what for many is an important annual pilgrimage.
Roby Page is a sociologist and photographer whose work has been featured in such periodicals as Visual Sociology and Contexts and in the St. Petersburg Times, the Gainesville Sun, and many other newspapers.
