Follow The Good - Short Story and 13 page photo essay: PAVED MAGAZINE

Paved Magazine's winter edition features my 13-page photo essay about India's common man cyclists.  Paved is now available as an iPad / iPhone app for anyone interested in checking out the images + short story about an epiphany brought on by a severe drug overdose, devil monkey twins, and a few words of wisdom from a sari wearing stranger while making 20,000 portraits of Indians on two wheels.

Outside Magazine. India, RadioShack and New Frontiers

The August 2011 issue of Outside Magazine back cover "Parting Shot" is an image I made of Team RadioShack during their warm-up ride for the Tour de Nasik cyclothon in India.  I'm fascinated by pro-cycling's recent push to expand into new global frontiers and am equally glad that mainstream, non-cycling magazines are willing to publish pictures of the trend.  

India Exhibition/TDI Fashion Week Wrap

It's 5am in Mumbai--or more appropriately, "the jet lag hour."

Here's a wrap from some of the happenings at my India Exhibition and TDI Fashion Week which served as a charity fundraiser and promotion for the forthcoming cycling race.  Next up, we're heading to Nasik, India for the team arrivals and to flag off stage one of the UCI 1.1 Tour of India.


TDI Fashion Week - Images by Gregg Bleakney

Video of Lobby Exhibition


Kick-Off Media Scrum

India Exhibition and the 2011 UCI 1.1 Tour of Mumbai

This afternoon, I'M hopping the bird to Mumbai for my "India on Two Wheels" exhibition at the Trident hotel for TDI Fashion Week--starting February 6.  It's a great opportunity to leverage my images to help encourage sustainable health and transportation initiatives in India.  After the show, I'll stick around for the UCI's 1.1 Tour of Mumbai, where teams RadioShack and Liquigas have just signed up for the start list.

Here's the press bit for the exhibition:
Gregg Bleakney's "India on Two Wheels" project was initially conceived on assignment at the 2010 Tour of Mumbai for VeloNews Magazine.  During the pre-race Cyclothon, he met some of the city's Dabba Wallah delivery cyclists and became fascinated by the country's cycling culture.  After the race, he postponed his return flight home, rented a bicycle and mini-van, and self-funded a two-month photo-tour around India--making over 16,000 portraits of cyclists. Gregg considers India's 300 million "common man" cyclists a cultural treasure at risk of extinction because of the emergence of a new class of inexpensive motorcycles.  By partnering with the Tour of Mumbai and ID Sports for this exhibition, he hopes to help preserve and share this fascinating bike culture while encouraging future bicycle transportation, health, and sport initiatives in India.

A web-preview of the show.

*New* India On Two Wheels - Mumbai Exhibition - Images by Gregg Bleakney

Portraits of People Along The Way

Outside Magazine - August Parting Shot Backstory

Outside Magazine is featuring a photo from my "Portraits of a Indian Bike Company" collection as their back cover "Parting Shot" in the August 2010 issue. The odd thing about this image is that I never consciously knew that I made it until several days after the fact. You see, just minutes after making the photo, I was drugged (long story) with a triple dose of some sort of hallucinogenic. I spent the next 30 hours on a wild, vivid, and sometimes scary trip under the watchful eye of my guest house owner. A recurring theme during my hallucinations (amongst many other things) were flying monkeys who took pleasure in burning me with motorcycle exhaust pipes--so I simply assumed that the monkey running through air in this photo was only part of my imagination. But a week after recovering from my cranial phantasmagoria, I flipped through my photo edit from that day and realized that this image was made prior to being drugged, that the monkey was entirely real, and finally remembered that I circled back to that location several times that week to try to get this cyclist with "monkey runner" picture.
So there he is on the back page of Outside magazine--a seemingly cute little monkey who was actually the sinister inspiration for an incredibly torturous and searing drug-induced head trip.

India - VeloNews Feature - The Bombay Project

The UCI's new race in Bombay, India is featured via an article I wrote in VeloNews Magazine's May issue.
In Bombay, I photographed the piece with some nice digs to retreat to @ the end of the day but nearly broke my worst hotel record a week later when I pulled an all-nighter to write the article in a rat infested, sewage seeping on the bathroom floor, ceiling fan dangling from exposed wires, crumbling walls, $3 per night room next to the New Delhi train station.
This assignment kicked off an amazing journey through India for which I've mused about in more detail as a guest on National Geographic's Adventure Blog and the back cover shot for Outside Magazine.
VeloNews also ran a double page photo-feature from the article I wrote on the Vuelta Colombia in last year's volume.

Here's a few clips:

What if cycling was your only choice?

*Click button on bottom right corner of this window to expand slideshow
 
Slideshow - Portraits of India on Two-Wheels - Images by Gregg Bleakney  
In 2005, I made a choice to go car-free in favor of using a bicycle as my primary source of mobility. And, every time I saddle up I’m 100% thrilled to be living this two-wheeled lifestyle.
But…what if I didn’t have this choice?
I spent 2.5 months on photojournalism assignments in India earlier this year and discovered there are an estimated 300 million Indian people who ride bicycles because they have no other option. I couldn’t help but wonder, “If cycling was NOT something I did by choice, but was designated by the caste I was born into, would I still love it the same?”  
To explore that question, I made 16,000 photos, (most of them portraits) of Indian cyclists: brick makers from the untouchable caste, milk deliverymen, paper delivery boys, homeless children, farmers, mystics, popsicle salesmen, slum dwellers, and more.  
Please enjoy this slideshow of 40 of my favorites…and keep in mind the one thing all of these people have in common—cycling is their only choice.  
Cheers,
Gregg

Air Travel Is a Trip

My life list of long-haul flights continues to grow with my new career, yet I'm convinced that these tin can teleports will always remain a trip.

My latest--starting with an assignment in India's Thar desert, making pictures of a man who commutes from his tent slum to the market everyday with his working camel in tow...followed up by back to back overnight bus trips and 21 hours of flights.  From the airport directly to my good college friend's bachelor party in San Francisco, hitting a line-up of the city's most swanky bars via a Mexican-themed chicken party bus.

Proof that time travel is possible and that reality definitely does not share a universal lens.

Leaving Basecamp

After spending nearly 1 month working in, around and out of this little basecamp in Rajasthan, India...it's time to move on:)  I'll miss the rooftop palace views.

out there

digging, searching, scratching. curiosity leads into a desert. finding nobody, finding nothing. and finding things that can't be imagined. 120 degrees is nuclear heat.  confusion, questioning, the swelter redefining--what is normal anyway?

me a few days ago -- the greatest project I've ever worked on

Hawking 4x6s at the Taj Mahal

I virtually-bumped into a guy complaining about the state of professional photography last week.  He said something like "we're all better off slingin' 4x6s at the Taj Mahal"

I happened to be close to the Taj Mahal a few days ago so I decided to give his advice a try--even though 2010 is teeing up to be the best year of my career.  I must say that hawking photos at the Taj was pretty damn fun...somehow it made me realize how much I really love being a photographer. 

Here's some of the images:

Faces in the VIP Tent - Tour of Mumbai

The President of the Indian Cycling Association looks on as J.J. Haedo wins the UCI 1.2 Tour of Mumbai.
Yes, that means that I'm in India right now:)