Wheels and Waves

Jo Fischer

May 18, 2015

Ocean, sun and motorcycles – Biarritz is the kind of place people long to visit. The photographer Jo Fischer was there. In LFI 4/2015 you can see the pictures he took last year with an M and an M9, at the Wheels and Waves biker event.
When Jo Fischer rode his Harley-Davidson to France in the summer of 2013, he merely intended to go on holiday. One of his mates had peaked his interest in a festival on the Atlantic coast with visitors coming from around the world to race their bikes and surf. Wheels & Waves is the Woodstock for bikers: Europe’s new custom motorbike scene has met in Biarritz annually since 2012 at the festival organized by the Southsiders MC, a club based in Toulouse. Wheels & Waves means wacky bikes, long beards and bright colours under the warm southern sun. For three days, bikers come to celebrate themselves and their machines … and Fischer was no longer just on holiday: taking photographs was his main priority.

The outcome is the book Wheels & Waves. Fischer designed the layout, had the book printed and distributes it himself via the shop on his website. From about 1000 photographs he chose 300 – a mixture of portraits, motorcycles and landscapes. He did not post-process a single image and, consequently, some appear dark as though clouds hang over them, and in others the motifs seem bathed in a muddy light. This is how Fischer understands photography: to capture an atmosphere, the photograph needs to be direct and unaltered.
ALL IMAGES ON THIS PAGE: © Jo Fischer

LFI 04.2015+-

Find more in LFI 4.2015. More

Jo Fischer+-

LFI-jofischer-20 Kopie
© Jo Fischer

Born in Berlin in 1970, Fischer grew up in Venezuela and Kuwait. He spent 20 years as a musician before finding his way to photography in 2008. His first solo exhibition took place in Hamburg in 2010, and in 2012 he was invited to the Hamburger Deichtorhallen with his series Herr Fischer bittet zu Tisch (Herr Fischer invites you to take a seat at the table); in 2015 he was nominated for the Kolga Award. Fischer travels constantly, always on the look out for a good story. More

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Wheels and Waves

Jo Fischer