If you’re riding down an open highway and happen to hear an Irish jig coming from a photographer straddling the double yellow line way up ahead, it’s probably Michael Lichter about to take your photo. The musician-turned-snapper gave up the drums for photography in the 1977, but still keeps a whistle handy for those lulls every lensman is familiar with, like waiting for the rain to ebb or the sun to peek above the horizon at the perfect moment.
For today, though, the Boulder-based photographer’s 18th annual exhibition of custom-built motorcycles is the daisy in Sturgis’ deafening, outlaw-themed, pipes-blasting cement. Instead of raising an upraised pinky and index finger and screaming as one might at the climax of one of the annual event’s many rock shows, one examines the motorcycles in this exhibit and finds the soul quieted as you might in a fine art gallery. This year’s presentation is titled “Passion Built – Garage to Gallery.”
“What I present in the gallery here at the Buffalo Chip is not a bike show like you can see at so many other bike events,” Lichter says. “This is an exhibition with a theme that changes every year. I challenged the invited artists and custom bike builders to push themselves and interpret these themes with their own personal styles.”
“As we do every year with these annual themed exhibitions – our 10th at the Buffalo Chip – we focus on an idea and hope that in addition to presenting incredible new custom motorcycles and artwork to the viewers that pass through this gallery, ” Lichter says, “ That this exhibition series gets people thinking and if we’re lucky, challenges the status quo.”
“In the end,” says Lichter, “With 38 brand new custom bikes on pedestals and 16 artists on the walls, all lit with theater lighting in a museum-like setting, I hope that it offers visitors a refreshing way to look at what these artists and builders (and builder-artists) are capable of and gets them to think in different ways. ”
