Exhibition Review: DOUG BIGGERT: HITCHIKERS AND A SANDAL SHOP
Doug Biggert, Hitchhiker Series (Wrong Direction 1), c. 2000s, C-print, 4 x 5 7/8 inches, Unique, © Doug Biggert, courtesy George Adams Gallery
Written by Megan May Walsh
Edited by Jana Massoud
Strangers carry a certain allure to them. They each have a story, a story yet to be known or a story imagined for them by fellow strangers. Perhaps they are lost souls wandering the ends of the Earth to discover a greater purpose awaiting them or perhaps they are adventure-seekers hoping to discover a new marvel of the natural world. The possibilities and complexity are endless, and photographer Doug Biggert made it his project to collect the possibilities and complexities of strangers’ stories.
The George Adams Gallery with the Robert Mann Gallery are displaying the wanderlust-esque of Doug Biggert’s work. The exhibition consists of two great bodies of work by Biggert, Hitchhikers and Sandal Shop, each of which documents encounters over the course of years. Hitchhikers is a series of portraits Biggert collected on his travels along I 80 and Route 49 in Northern California beginning in the early 1970s. Sandal Shop is mainly portraits of patrons that frequented Socrates Sandal shop on West Balboa Boulevard in Newport Harbor, CA, from 1968-1972.
Doug Biggert, Hitchhiker Series (Coca-Cola), c. 1981, C-print, 3 1/2 x 5 1/8 inches, Unique, © Doug Biggert, courtesy George Adams Gallery
As an artist drawn to the margins of society, Biggert captured the traveling faces of the evolving 70’s, documenting an alternative lifestyle so many strangers found themselves living. While this snapshot was an unwritten narrative of these strangers’ lives, Biggert’s images carry a story heavier than most words. The artist captures visibility in his portraits - he makes visible the faces on the fringes of society, wandering, dreaming, and exploring.
Biggert’s photographic endeavor for Hitchhikers spanned approximately 450 images over about three decades and Sandal Shop grew to more than 1,400 images over three years. Each captured face - their posture, expression, clothes - was given a moment of visibility within a photographic story of the reality of the people that made up the margins of an early 1970s society. Their narrative was memorialized into history, not to be forgotten. The artists, vagrant souls, and wanderers hitchhiking across the country can now be found in history’s archive. Their portraits will stand as a sign of the times - a time of living on the edge.
The images amassed to create Sandal Shop first began as a project to photograph customers to be displayed in the store. Snapping with his Kodak Instamatic, Biggert eventually began to capture a record of the wondrous peculiarities of Southern California during a point of social and political change. The quirks in facial expression, style, hair, clothes, accessories, stature, posture, etc. across the patrons emerged to display a collective identity of Southern California’s idiosyncrasy. Following his photographic impulses to document the visual placeholders that represent subculture, Biggert creates a collection of images that uphold the wondrous allure of strangers, particularly strangers with an air of wanderlust, and the stories they have bundled within them.
Doug Biggert, Hitchhiker Series (It Takes Time...), c.1970s, c-print, 3 1/2 x 4 7/8 inches, Unique, © Doug Biggert, courtesy George Adams Gallery
The exhibition Hitchhikers and Sandal Shop by photographer Doug Biggert can be seen at the George Adams Gallery in New York from March 31st to May 7th, 2022 and at the Robert Mann Gallery from March 31, 2022 - May 13, 2022.
