Michael Krupka had passed Philadelphia’s Via Bicycle repair shop for years before he ventured inside. As a photographer rather than a cyclist, he was drawn by the jumble of frames and parts in the front window. “My father was a machinist and when I was a child we had a workshop at home where he could repair pretty much anything mechanical he encountered,” Krupka recalls. “As an artsy kid, I didn’t inherit those skills, but I do have an aesthetic attraction to machines and mechanical things.”
Krupka was out that day on what he describes as an “intentional photo hunt”. He asked a guy repairing a bike near the entrance for permission. “He just shrugged and carried on,” Krupka says. “I’d hoped to capture the graphic chaos against the backlit window. What I found was an even more tangled scene, with even more bikes in the foreground, which I used for the bottom third of the composition,” he says. “The shot has something of a maze or jigsaw element, too, a kind of puzzle that might have interesting things to find within it.”
Krupka adds that including colour would have “substantially lessened the impact of the geometry of the frames, wheels, seats. The blue-grey colour adds a layer of depth and energy, and has that touch of nostalgia, too. I’d wager that a great many of us rode bikes when we were young.”
