Picture This
On July 23, 1982, Adventure Cycling cofounder Greg Siple shot a black-and-white portrait of Laura Orton. A touring cyclist from Albion, Michigan, Orton had stopped by Adventure Cycling’s Missoula offices during a tour beginning and ending in Seattle. It was the first of 35 portraits that Siple would shoot of cyclists that riding season and the first-ever entry into the National Bicycle Touring Portrait Collection.
A little over three decades later, on October 28, 2016, Siple photographed the other cyclist on this page, a Pennsylvanian named Mike Ice riding from Yorktown, Virginia, to Astoria, Oregon. It was the last of 231 portraits Siple took that year. It was also his final portrait before retiring.
Between those two images lies a chain of nearly 5,000 photographs Siple made of cyclists visiting our headquarters. “In this era of camera phones, internet, high-definition screens, and instant video recording anytime, anywhere in full color,” Siple wrote in the February 2017 Open Road Galley story celebrating his retirement, “I still find a simple black-and-white image a powerful thing.”
That sentiment has held true ever since. While the staffers who’ve taken up the project now shoot in color, we still convert a copy of each portrait to black and white. And that is how you will see them when the entire collection is digitized, archived, and posted online later this year as part of our 50th Anniversary celebration.
To give you a sense of how extensive the endeavor (led by former staffer Eva Dunn-Froebig) has been, it’s taken around 100 volunteers several months just to type up the thousands of handwritten stories accompanying the portraits. But we’re sure those volunteers, if not their keyboards, would agree: It is history worth preserving.
Thanks to the support of Brooks England and a few dedicated donors, we’ve digitized the entire collection. With a little more support from donors like you, we’ll be able to build the website to host this collection and share it with the public for generations to come. Donate today to help make this, and other important projects, happen.
