// 100 Bikes
Posted on Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
Occasionally someone does something that seems amazingly simple and like something I should have thought of myself. But I always wind up admitting that I could never have thought of it myself, and even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to execute it as flawlessly as the person who actually did think of it.
The Hundreds is one of these projects. It’s a simple idea: 100 days to meet and write about 100 cyclists, each in 100 words. The 100 words aren’t about the bike, either. It’s not about who has the latest technology, or the coolest fixie. It’s about the person on the bike. What a great way to showcase the variety of people who ride! The commuters, the racers, the hipster fixies, the Dutch-esque city bikers, the mountain bikers….the list goes on, and they’re all captured on The Hundreds.
Blake Kasemeir does a great job getting the essence of a person on a bike into 100 words. I’d love to see this project turned into a book–the photos are sometimes a little grainy, but that lends to the realism of them–these cyclists are just like the rest of us, they’re real people. Yet while the photos are very real, the sepia tone makes the subjects seem as though they are special–somehow apart from the rest of us, because the colors of their world don’t match with the colors of our “real” world. In short, he conveys that each of these people is an individual. Each one of them is unique and special, each has a unique bike, and a unique story. Yet they’re just like us. Very cool.
I know if each of these 100 people was given a page in a book, I’d have great Christmas presents for many of the cyclists on my list this holiday season. Plus, you might think that Blake would be bored after completing his 100 cyclist project. What to do now, besides work on getting a book published, right?
Wrong.
It seems that Blake has started a new project, called Know Good Deed. He’s only on deed number two, but it looks like he’s doing something similar to The Hundreds. He’s documenting the good deeds that go on out there in the world. Looks like something worth keeping an eye on–though I’m still holding out hope for a book of The Hundreds.