Whenever Doug Biggert (1941-2023) picked up a hitch-hiker in Northern California he took their picture. To make the “explanation simpler”, and reassure hitchhikers of his intentions, he kept a binder full of his pictures to show them.
What turned into a decades-long project began in 1973, when Biggert was hosting a twice-weekly late-night jazz show at KVMR, a radio station out of Nevada City, CA. Driving his green VW Bug on his commute to and from San Francisco and later Sacramento, he began picking up hitchhikers for company and taking informal portraits of his passengers.
Doug Biggert was born in Evanston, Illinois and raised in St Louis, MO. A graduate of Washington University, he began photographing regularly in 1968 while living in California, taking pictures of the patrons who frequented the Socrates Sandal shop, where Biggert worked, on West Balboa Boulevard in Newport Harbor, CA, from 1968-1972.
Biggert hitchhiked through the southwest as a teenager and around Europe during a summer abroad while in college. He eventually found his way to California, but would visit all fifty states, through his own wanderlust and his role as the manager of distribution of magazines for Tower Records, a position he held from 1978 until 1999. In this capacity, Biggert was hugely influential in improving distribution and exposure for a nascent Zine scene.
“For years, starting in the late ‘70s, I was taking pictures of hitchhikers. A hitchhiker is someone you may know for an hour, or a day, or, every so often, a little longer, yet, when you leave them, they’re gone. If I took a picture, I reasoned, I’d have a memory. I kept a small portfolio of photos in the car to help explain why I wanted to take their picture. This helped a lot. It also led me to look for hitchhikers, so that I could get more pictures.
“I almost always had a camera… I finally settled on the Olympus XA – a wonderful little pocket camera. (I’ve taken a picture of the moon rising with this camera.) One time I asked a chap if I could take a photo, and he said, “You took my picture a few years ago.” I showed him the album and he picked himself out. “That’s me,” he said, pointing…”
– Doug Biggert
Doug Biggert
Via: Robert Mann Gallery and George Adams Gallery.
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