Bicycles Locked to Poles Review

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(More customer reviews)A wonderfully quirky book of photos of those corpses of New York's streets: wrecked bicycles attached to poles. These bikes, stripped to their frames, their tires bent in countless directions, are reminiscent of dead pirates, their skeletons left leaning against their ship's mast. Not a big glossy photo book, but that's probaly intentional:if it were, it would betray the subject. But these pictures are both funny and poignant, and it's one of the rare photography books that you'll want to look at every day.

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This mournful but pleasing collection features many of the best photographs of bicycles locked to poles ever taken. Shot using an old-fashioned 35mm Nikon, the photos here follow in the tradition of John James Audubon, Bernd and Hilla Becher, the Peterson Field Guides, and The Observer's Book of Steam Locomotives.Bicycles Locked to Poles began in early 2001, when a magenta arrow — spray-painted on the sidewalk by a representative of the electrical utility — pointed directly to the sadly bent, Dali-esque wheel of a bicycle on the photographer's street. Glassie passed by every day for months, until one day it was gone. He has been documenting bicycles locked to poles, bent, broken and otherwise, in and around his East Village neighborhood of New York ever since.This volume presents a careful selection from Glassie's collection of over a thousand color photographs, as well as a graphical guide to present, damaged, and missing bicycle parts, and a quote from Marvin Minsky's The Society of Mind. Bicycles Locked to Poles is a rare treasury for anyone interested in bikes, poles, locks, or the forgotten artifacts of the urban landscape.

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