Appeared in Cafe Racer Magazine's April/May 2021 issue.

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BY ANTHONY CONROY, Cafe Racer Magazine

 

If pictures are worth a thousand words, Henry von Wartenberg sure has a lot to say. 

 

Thirty years into a career that has taken him to dozens of countries, Henry, a freelance photographer from Argentina, has given a voice to motorcyclists all over the world by spending much of his life finding moments that words can never capture. 

 

As a documentarian, Henry’s viewfinder neither discriminates nor necessarily celebrates, although its hard not to come away with a positive feeling after seeing his pics. He’s just there marking the passage of man and machine, wherever the two happen to intersect.

 

His job has included projects for Harley-Davidson and BMW and countless others, but his latest venture is personal. So many photos taken during so many trips — some business, some family, some solo — means Henry has a pent-up portfolio of photos that don’t fit into his other projects, but don’t exactly belong on the cutting room floor either. Instead, the photos needed a home, and his latest project — a book called “The Riders: Motorcycle Adventurers, Cruisers, Outlaws, and Racers the World Over ” — is the vehicle to get his art in front of your eyes.

 

“It’s not my life’s work, but it’s a collection of pictures with a common point — riders and motorcycles,” he says. “It’s a collection of pictures taken in many places. It’s like a photo album that I’m sharing.”

 

“The Riders,” Henry’s 25th book and due for release on April 13, includes a hand-picked edit of bikes of all shapes, sizes, ages and displacements. They range from a fleet of police-prepped Harley-Davidson FLHTP Electra Glides tasked with royal escorts in Madrid to utilitarian rides that are beaten, weathered Frankensteins doing their their best just to get from Point A to Point B. 

 

The riders are no different. 

 

One sits aboard a shiny silver chopper, his face sun-soaked and tanned from too many beachy sunsets, waiting for the next light to turn green on a San Diego strip. Another’s face is leathered like his flip-flops while he sits proudly atop his knobby-tired Honda Dream scooter in a Thailand jungle.

 

“You go to places where people have to use the motorcycle to live,” said the 54-year-old author from his home outside Buenos Aires. “That is the most important thing in my book: all the different ways that people use their bike. Whether it’s for recreation or you need to ride to live. There’s a photo that is on the back cover, it’s a picture of a Bolivian guy with wood to build a fire. He needs that to live. For him, the bike is a tool. It’s not recreation. It’s a tool to find wood and food and everything he needs to live.”

 

Despite the contrasts, an arc can be traced throughout the book that ties the hard-drinking group of Hells Angels in San Isidro, Argentina, to the poor chap on his scooter in New Delhi, India — as he waits to enter an intersection he’s grossly overshadowed by the “rider” next to him sitting one-up on an elephant.

 

“There’s a common theme between every kind of rider in the world,” Henry says. “If you find someone who’s a BMW fan or someone who’s an Indian fan, you’ll find that it’s always good to chat about motorcycles. When you talk about motorcycles, it’s does not matter if he’s a Harley fan and you ride a Chinese motorcycle. We are a big family. That’s a little bit romantic, maybe, but it’s usually the case.”

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Henry’s photos are rich in detail and personality. In one photo, a close-up taken in Garmisch, Germany, in 2018, a woman wears a leather jacket loaded with pins on each lapel, a checkered-flag scarf, and an old-school, blue metal-flake, full-face helmet. She’s wearing dark aviator sunglasses and bright red lipstick. We no nothing about her, yet we know everything about her.

 

“An old journalistic maxim states that if it has four legs, has a cat’s tail, and meows like a cat, it is a cat! The same applies to those who live for motorcycle riding,” says the photo’s caption in “The Riders.” “You can tell by their faces, the way they move — it isn’t difficult to spot them.”

 

In another photo, which Henry took in Lujan de Cayo, Argentina, in 2012, a guy happily wheelies his 1977 Yamaha XT500.

 

“I shot this ‘old school’ Endruo bike from the seat of my 1948 Flathead Harley that has no speedometer, but I can assure you we weren’t moving slowly!” Henry happily recounts in the book. One look at the photo and you can imagine the smile on Henry’s face and the wind rush by while the stunt unfolds. In another photo, taken in Austria, eagle-eyed readers can catch a glimpse of Henry in action. That’s him reflected in the mirrored Ariel gas tank. 

 

Henry’s photos put us in places we want to be and with people we’d like to hang out with.

 

A rider in a gorilla mask in Uyuni, Bolivia. A wall of death in Garmisch. A ribbon of switchbacks along the Passo del Rombo at the Italian-Austrian border. A woman shooting flames from the ass-end of her BMW Spitfire at a rally in Germany. A man herding horses in Mongolia.

 

Then, of course, there are the motorcyclists who seem to confuse their bikes for an F-150, hauling anything and everything, whether the cargo be wood, goods, families, dogs, or “old ladies.” In one picture, three women sit behind their male taxi rider on their way to church in the Dominican Republic. The women are wearing their Sunday-best dresses, with the two in the back sitting side-saddle.

 

It goes without saying that so many of the photos are accompanied by amazing landscapes, many of which feature Henry’s native Argentina.

 

Henry grew up in Mar del Plata, a coastal city about 200 miles southeast of Buenos Aires, and had a habit of stealing his mother’s Honda PC50. When he was 11, she finally relented and handed over the bike as a gift, at first limiting his riding to the block around his house — “an authorized ride zone,” he calls it.

 

It’s safe to say that zone has grown exponentially, though not all of his rides are on bikes with motors.

 

On April 1, Henry plans to embark on his next major project: a bicycle ride from San Francisco to New York. “I will try to do it like a road movie, like a diary. But this will be my own story,” he says.

 

He expects the trip to take about 50 days if he averages 85 miles per day. He’ll be riding a 1990s-era Giant Allegre. “Nothing techie,” he says. “One-hundred percent old school.”

 

Like so many of his journeys, the trip will be well documented.

 

“I always have a camera on me,” Henry said, noting that a Leica frequently accompanies him. On so many occasions, he finds himself in the right spot. “The pictures come to you like a magnet. In foreign countries, maybe it’s because I pay attention. Maybe that’s the reason that every time I travel I see so many things. But you don’t look for situations. It comes to you as a gift.”

 

Of course, life on the road can be difficult, and not all situations are simpatico. Like in Columbia, when armed FARC guerrillas occupied a town ahead of him and blockaded the road Henry was using. Or in the U.S., when a convoy of riders wasn’t pleased with his presence.

 

“They’re not always happy with my picture-taking, and there can be very angry guys,” he said. “Many times in the U.S. on the highways, there’s so many huge bands of riders. Guys say, ‘Don’t take my fucking picture.’ Sometimes it’s not easy. You say, ‘I’m a photographer and I’m here on an assignment.’ You only have two seconds.”

 

To assemble “The Riders,” Henry said he had 2,000 or so pictures he wanted to publish. That was pared down to 250. Then to 150.

 

“It’s not easy to eliminate so many,” he says, the only time traces of defeat can be heard through his Spanish accent. His voice rises again as he mentions that his library of images will only increase with more travels and assignments. “I have a feeling that in a few years, there will be a second part.”

 

The pictures chosen for “The Riders” are his babies, but he does have favorites. Like the cover photo, which features his buddy Cristian Sica looking bad-ass while drag-racing in the dirt. And, there’s the photo, mentioned earlier, of the Bolivian man carrying wood strapped to his back while riding a Korean-made Pegasus T150. To Henry, the scene proved motorbikes are everywhere — versatile, adaptable, unstoppable.

 

“We crossed paths in the middle of nowhere,” Henry says of his Bolivian counterpart. In the book, Henry says he was looking for a path that joined two salt flats when “a wide road opened in front of us, and I could see the shape of another motorcycle far in the distance. There was nothing else around, only sand. No houses, and no trees.”

 

That Pegasus, he says, “was as important to him as a camel to a Bedouin.”

 

“The Riders” ($45 U.S./$60 Canada, The Quarto Group publishing) includes a foreword by Guinness World Record holder Emilio Scotto, author of “The Longest Ride” and who rode 500,000 miles in 10 years, and essays by journalists/influencers Paul d’Orleans, Peter Egan, Dave Nichols, and Aerostich founder Andy Goldfine. And, of course, there is an essay by Henry himself along with plenty of first-person descriptions accompanying many of the pictures.

 

“I was surprised to see several of my friends in the book! That’s was delightful,” says Paul d’Orleans, who wrote the section of the book entitled “The Bike Riders.” “Henry von Wartenberg is a very talented and interesting individual, and his global viewpoint on motorcycle culture is super refreshing in this age of neo-tribal attitudes. We’re all in this together.”