A PHOTO SERIES BY DEAN BRADSHAW
Featuring Tamara Raye
Three Stones From the Sun
AN EXPLORATION OF OUR CONNECTION WITH THE NATURAL WORLD
Photography by John Ryan Hebert | Featuring Todd Blubaugh
With quotes by Alan Watts
You are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.
You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it, like leaves from a tree or waves from the ocean.
If you go off into a far, far place and get very quiet, you’ll come to realize you’re connected with everything.
We are all as much an extraordinary phenomenon of nature as trees, clouds, the patterns in running water, the flickering of fire, the arrangement of stars and the form of a galaxy.
Golden Age
CHIPPA WILSON FINDS HIS FUTURE IN THE PAST
Words by Travis Ferré | Photography by Nick Green
Chippa Wilson looks good inside an old bar. Especially at noon, tucked into a Naugahyde booth that’s a bit sticky from years of booze and salt spilling over it. The dark windows shield us from the bright noonday sun of your average California Wednesday, while Wilson’s thorough and ornate tattoo work proudly signifies his commitment to the art. He even has plastic wrap covering a fresh piece he had done yesterday by Nathan Kostechko in Los Angeles. Wilson’s been in town getting his knee looked at following a recent tweak and couldn’t leave without getting some work done by the acclaimed artist.
We’re at the Reno Room in Long Beach. It’s an old dive, and they say Charles Bukowski frequented it when he was living in nearby San Pedro, playing pool on the notoriously crooked table in the back. He liked the hours (Reno Room famously opens at 6 a.m. and doesn’t shut until 2 a.m.) that cater to the local longshoremen community servicing the port, along with your usual all-hours barflies. And us. We don’t look entirely out of place here.
They recently fused a Mexican food spot called Cocorenos with Reno Room, joining two California institutions into one magical beacon of respite from the workaday world: dive bar and Mexican food, together at last. Wilson is wearing a black T-shirt and white denim with a freshly buzzed head, and he perks up every time a loud bike rips past the busy intersection outside. Because it’s located on the corner of East Broadway and Redondo Ave, it’s not uncommon to hear the rattle of a vintage Harley pulling into the alley out back. Wilson glances outside to get a peek at each one.
“I crave margaritas, man,” he says, looking at the menu. “Where I live you can get beers off tap two minutes down the road, but no margis.” He speaks in a one-of-kind drawl, fusing a subtle lisp with a more “country” Australian accent than his surf pals. His voice comes to you in offbeat rhythms full of kindness.
“The states and California are crazy, man,” he adds. “The amount of culture around here. Motorcycles, surfing, art, music, cars. I love it.” Wilson’s an American-made motor man and just recently sold a signature green 1963 Chevy C10 truck that had become synonymous with him.
Today, we’re not far from Scotty Stopnik’s Cycle Zombies shop in Huntington Beach, a place that’s inspired Wilson for years. He admits to peppering Stopnik with endless questions about bikes and even bought his first one — a ’64 Harley panhead — from Stopnik.
“Thank fuck for social media,” he says. “One good thing about it: I had my blinders on being a surf rat my whole life, and I’ve been playing catchup on hobbies. Scotty has been an inspiration for me for a long time. His lifestyle is sick. Surfs every morning, skates, has his crew and his family all there building old Harleys. I follow him and learn a ton that way.”
The TouchTunes machine — one of the modern updates adopted in the Reno Room — kicks up and Interpol’s “The Rover” comes on. Wilson orders the house margarita with a basket of chips and salsa. Our dark-eyed waitress asks about some of his tattoo work before walking away to get our drinks. He vibes with the music and says, “This song could be a really sick part in a surf video.”
Filmmaker Kai Neville once told me he thought Chippa Wilson was the most recognized surfer he’s ever traveled with. Foreign shores, airports, bars, coffee shops and parking lots, Wilson catches the eye, and surfers all over the world have grown to obsess over his video parts. During filming for Neville’s movie Cluster, kids in the Canary Islands would follow the crew around to spots hoping for glimpses of him. Wilson’s run in Neville’s now-classic surf films — Lost Atlas, Dear Suburbia and Cluster — were an obvious fit and have become the standard to which all progression is held. His surfing was exactly what excited Neville about his generation and what he felt inspired to showcase. “Consistency is the thing with Chippa,” Neville says. “To land things as big and technical as he does with the consistency he has is unreal.”
Wilson’s gold eyes (the late Andy Irons famously called him the Gold Lion) and tattoos do catch the eye, but his surfing is what keeps the jaws on the floor. His creativity and ability to tweak and manipulate his board in ways surfers have only dreamed of while maintaining his signature style has always been his point of differentiation in the water.
“He looks so good on a board,” says filmmaker Michael Cukr, who spent a lot of time following Wilson around before the pandemic, crashing with him for three months straight in Australia to film him surfing. “Nothing looks unnatural. And his whole vibe is a throwback; skaters like him, bikers like him, surfers love him.” But it wasn’t always like that.
Wilson didn’t follow the same path many professional surfers do. He was a late bloomer and remains one of the most refreshing overnight success stories the surf industry has ever produced. In 2009, Wilson was surfing and working construction back home in Cabarita Beach, Australia — a sponsored local pro but not recognized much outside the town limits. Stab Magazine created a contest called “Little Weeds” that Wilson entered. The internet clip competition offered surfers, filmmakers and photographers the chance to submit their work to be voted on in one of the first successful online comps in the surf industry’s rush to figure out the internet. Wilson’s segment, edited by Riley Blakeway, was a tour de force of holy-shit proportions and is probably still one of the greatest discoveries of the internet age. He went from local ripper in Australia to international star with that clip nearly overnight. It led to a signature film in 2010 (Now), new sponsors — including one with Kustom shoes, which put him on the first Kustom Airstrike trip, a contest that put up $50,000 for the best air of the trip. Kai Neville was on that trip and remembers its being the turning point. “I knew after that trip he was one of the best in the world,” says Neville. “His technique was way beyond what I thought, and he stomped everything he tried.”
Surfing had just seen Neville’s debut film Modern Collective shatter the old guard, launching a progression push that would consume the next decade of surfing. Wilson was quickly snatched up and put into the crew thanks to his technical aerial surfing, easygoing demeanor and throwback look of full-body tats, shaggy blonde locks and freckles. He quickly became a crowd favorite.
In the past, most surfers who injected skate tricks into their surfing did so at the expense of style or success rate — often ushering themselves into obscurity or tiny niche pockets of surfing. Wilson shattered that stereotype by doing tricks no one had seen before and did so with a style that was easy on the eyes.
“As a grom, I tried all this stuff and never pulled it much, which is why I did so bad at contests growing up,” he says. “I found doing shuv-its much easier than winning.” But his surfing drastically improved after that and his make-to-attempt ratio skyrocketed, while his aerial surfing became elite, freaking out and inspiring a generation of surfers along the way.
During his first official magazine trip to France, Wilson tagged along with the legendary presence that is Nathan Fletcher — surfer, skater, snowboarder, motocross rider, icon — and the admiration was instantly mutual. Wilson paddled around the French beach breaks on that trip with all the big names of surfing who were in town to compete. And the part that freaked him out the most: They were all in awe of him. The late Andy Irons paddled right up to him on the first day he was there, saying, “Yeah, Chippa! The only dude I know with gold eyes!” The entire lineup, a who’s who of surfers including Irons, Dusty Payne, John John Florence and Jordy Smith all made sure to say what’s up to the most exciting addition to surfing in that time.
A decade later, Wilson has appeared in every surf movie that matters, adding tricks and his approach to the pantheon of surf progression. While rehabbing the tweaked knee and wading his way through the pandemic years, Wilson posted up in Tasmania, the rural, often chilly and isolated Australian territory with his partner Brinkley Davies, a marine biologist and adventurer. They’ve got their dogs and a garage full of toys: Motorcycles, surfboards and all the odds and ends you can think of to keep him busy in the isolated space. “Brinkley keeps me young, man,” he says of his partner. “She’s always swimming with sharks and whales and seals. Always up to something. I just try to keep up now and tinker on the bikes when I can.”
I ask him what got him into motorcycles, and he quickly lights up. “My old man has always been bike-oriented,” he says. “He was always sitting up late at night watching speedways and motocross, and I remember he had photos of himself when he was young on all the enduro trials bikes, ripping around, so that’s always been an interest and inspiration. I would have got into it earlier, but surfing took a pretty good chunk of my hobby life for many years.”
But now, with his home set up in Tasmania, a good decade of game-changing surfing in the can, and plenty of opportunity on the horizon, he’s focusing himself on the garage.
“My mate Coco put me on my first Harley Davidson panhead with a jockey shift,” he says. “He just told me, ‘Go for gold!’!’ and off I went down the road all jenky and all over the place, not skilled at all. It’s the weirdest way to ride, but I came back with the biggest smile on my face and got into building one of those straight away.”
The bike, famously known as “Scorch,” is Wilson’s first moto-child. “It’s a ’54 panhead with a springer front end. It’s super mechanical and old school. The clutch rod is linked by an old rusty chain, it has a crazy sissy bar and looks like it might blow up beneath you, but it’s so sick. It’s my first Harley and definitely the one that got me hooked on riding.”
The Tasmanian landscape is vast and rural and old. It’s full of winding roads, lonely petrol stations and isolated nooks and crannies — the perfect place for riding and exploring. With a garage full of vehicles — from bikes to surfboards to trucks and jeeps — Wilson has plenty to tinker on as he prepares for the world to open back up.
“Anything old, I’m drawn to,” he says, which makes me chuckle. It’s funny that one of the world’s most progressive surfers — a guy who’s spent his life living ahead of his time — has stopped in Tasmania to let us all catch up and dig into his obsessions from the past. He’s like the addition of a TouchTunes machine in an old bar. It doesn’t feel right until you learn how to make it work for you.
Back inside the Reno Room and into our second round of margaritas, Wilson whips out his phone and starts putting music on through the TouchTunes app as he tells me he’s recently bought his first new car.
“I just got a regular car the other day,” he says. “My first new car ever. I got a Jeep Gladiator, American, ‘ute’ type of thing. I can’t even work it yet, it’s too modern.” He smiles and finally makes his musical choice, and the TouchTunes fires up the classic Social Distortion tune called Telling Them. As it kicks in, I look over at the newly updated pool table, hoping to see the ghost of Bukowski stumbling around in the back, but I only see two college girls skipping class to drink margaritas and play pool.
Things have changed here. You can get Mexican food, the pool table isn’t crooked anymore, and it requires quarters; the juke box is connected to the internet but somehow, if you squint your eyes and the song is right, you realize this place hasn’t changed a bit. The rare spot where the past, present and future all mingle together in a swirly modern vintage union that makes perfect sense. Sometimes it happens in a rural Tasmanian garage full of vintage bikes and progressive surfboards, and sometimes it happens on the corner of East Broadway and Redondo when Chippa Wilson is in town.
A Burning Desire
A LETTER FROM A PYROPHYTE
Words by Chris Nelson | Photography by Steve Shannon
The faint smell of smoke woke me. For a moment I thought I had dreamt it, because as the wind blew through my dew-soaked branches, there were only hints of rose and sagebrush, both faded in the overpowering stench of sulfur. The delight drained from me until I smelled the smoke again, and then distant in the northwest I saw it: a white wisp of burn floating through the summer sunrise, blurred behind the mist of the prismatic hot spring.
Typically, fires like this burn once every few centuries, so I felt blessed to see it in my lifetime. I watched with joy as the flames drew nearer, engulfing hundreds of thousands of acres of lodgepole pines, day after day, month after month, and I imagined with glee the moment when the searing heat would become so strong that the pitch resin spreading over my serotinous skin would begin to melt. Slowly I’d feel the cones on my branches spreading wider and wider apart before breaking open, and in an instant I’d be resurrected in a shower of small, winged seeds that would float down through the smoky air.
My offspring would bury themselves in the ground as the fires raged above, destroying me and the community of trees I once knew – but there is no pain in this, because as foundations of the forest we know it’s just part of death’s carefully choreographed dance with life. When the thin-barked trees turn black and crumble, they are swallowed by the forest floor and fed back into the carbon-rich soil, which is then bathed in unbroken sunlight, and soon my seedlings would sprout from the bed to restart the cycle of growth. Without our sacrifice, the forest cannot be renewed, as nature intended it to be.
Yellowstone Fires, 1988 | Photo by Mike Lewelling, National Park Service
Every night as the flames spread, I dreamt about what the ground might feel like, or how tall my offspring could eventually grow, but one morning I awoke to the strange sound of giant silver birds soaring just above the tree crowns, spraying white dust in every direction. They came in flocks and slowly forced the blaze to retreat, but thankfully the swirling inferno refused to surrender. I watched in disgust as the birds flew through the red sky, and I wondered what motivation they had to try and control our natural cycle. I held onto hope, but only until snowflakes began to fall from the firmament, and then the silver birds disappeared as the fires finally died, and with them died my budding dreams.
It’s been more than three decades since those flames went out, and I still wait and wonder if my time will ever come. In those first few years after the fires, I envied the young pines growing in the charred remains of their parent plants and prayed for a lightning strike to ignite the decay at their roots so that my young could have their opportunity to branch out. I fought off poisonous thoughts that by the time the fires returned, my seeds would already have soured, or that the fires wouldn’t return at all, and my existence would be for nothing.
Now and then I’d catch a whiff of smoke and be momentarily overwhelmed with anticipation, but to my dismay I saw nothing come through the forest veil. Until five years ago, when a blaze erupted and raged, with flames once again kissing the clouds. Unfortunately, though, any hope I had was again drenched by the giant silver birds and their white dust. I damned their invasive hubris and inability to understand this natural process of death and rebirth.
Eventually my thoughts shifted when for the first time I questioned the consequences of my pyro prayers. Looking down at the young lodgepoles around me, I realized they hadn’t matured enough to grow full seed banks, so if they burned, their life cycle would end in vain and ash. The intentions of an outside encroachment no longer mattered to me once I realized the dangers that my forest now faced.
Yellowstone Fires, 1988 | Photo by Jeff Henry, Yellowstone Digital Slide Archives
Fires have become far more frequent, and their artificial suppression happens quicker than ever, and as the farthest edges of the forest are pushed inward by a hungrily ambitious species, the underbrush tinder piles higher. It seems the intent of nature no longer matters, and when the fire I once admired returns, it will likely be sparked by those creatures, and I will feel no delight. The blaze will be larger, move faster, and burn hotter than anything before it, and it will grow so intense that nothing will be spared, as the resin on my skin boils and my few viable seeds wither to dust.
There is peace in accepting one’s fate. I am certain now that I will never be born again, and I no longer dream about how tall the next generation might grow. I recognize that there is no stopping the outside influences who come to my home to snuff out nature’s intentions. I used to pray for fire, but now my only prayers are for the fledgling pines, and that those hungry creatures will not spark the next blaze. I do still wonder what the ground feels like, and hope that one day soon I’ll know.
The Desert Said Dance
HEAVEN AND HELL IN BAJA
Words by Forrest Minchinton | Photography by Mojave Productions
In order to be victorious, a desert racer must master the art of pain and suffering, and there’s no off-road race where that’s more evident than the SCORE International Baja 1000. Since 1967 the legendary race has been hosted on the Baja California Peninsula, a formidable place that has shaped my approach to life.
My father first took me to Baja as a young boy. It was shared with him by his mentors, as theirs had done for them. The location is not secret, but the lack of modern comforts, the threat of banditos, and the harsh desert environment discourage most fair-weather travelers. But for people like us, it’s a paradise hiding in plain sight, where you can surf waves in solitude and ride free on the endless unspoiled terrain.
Dad fostered in me an appreciation of the rugged locale and the rewards of a demanding existence, where you must learn to appreciate the joys of eating dirt, bracing winds and plucking barbed cactus from your foot with a rusty set of pliers. If you can’t fall in love with the suffering of Baja, then there is little that you will find attractive about this place or the legendary event that inspired our feature-length film, The Desert Said Dance.
It’s the story of four men who understand and appreciate the uniquely intoxicating anguish of Baja. Each of us has different motivations, backgrounds and varying levels of success in our racing lives: The Champion, Colton Udall. The Ironman, Derek Ausserbauer. The Racer, Nic Garvin. And me, The Dreamer. All of us underdogs from humble beginnings, united by motorcycles and bound together through an incredible experience— a brotherhood that could be formed and strengthened by a common goal and shared suffering.
Leading the team, Udall is a five-time Baja 1000 champion who was sidelined and semi-retired after a debilitating back injury. In search of redemption and a chance to relive his former glory, he shared his wealth of knowledge and experience with us, and our hero has now become our mentor.
Ausserbauer’s love for two wheels started at roughly 2 years old. He has entered the Baja 1000 for the past four years, coming up second on multiple occasions. But when a race team didn’t pan out, he decided to have a go at it solo as an Ironman and won the Ironman championship. This time, he’s going for the win with our team.
Garvin is our third team member and shares in that illusive dream of victory in Baja. Everything in his life is dedicated to racing, and he craves that championship more than anything else. He was introduced to Baja when he watched Robby Bell and Udall in the San Felipe 250 and rode the track the day after the race. For him, Baja represents freedom – and racing through those landscapes in isolation is his true happiness.
The cost of attempting this race is exorbitant, but the ultimate test of man and machine is what inspires people to spend their life savings to give it a go. Our passion came before any paycheck, and all four of us had a singular mission: to win. But we would soon be reminded that Baja always wins; if you try to beat it, it will crush you. Anyone can enter the Baja 1000, but not all those who do will finish. Some are not tough enough, others are not prepared enough, and sometimes Baja finds a way to take down the best of us, regardless of effort.
Unfortunately, some individuals pay the ultimate price and leave this world in their attempts to conquer it, but still, every year, people keep coming back for the challenge. To survive this race you must dance a very fine line between triumph and disaster, and only those who balance that line correctly will succeed. Those who can turn pain into enjoyment can carry on day and night, through the toughest of challenges, and those who do the dance just right might have a chance to win in glory.
The Desert Said Dance is about the subtleties of performance, the art of the machine, and the mammoth task of racing the longest, nonstop, point-to-point off-road race in the world. To the uninitiated, it will be a breathtaking introduction to the spectacle and sublime wonder of the Baja 1000, and the people who endure enormous hardship in a landscape like no other. With director Lincoln Caplice, producers Harrison Mark and Jam Hassan, cinematographer Andy Gough and editor Lucas Vasquez, we had the perfect band of misfits to make this incredible film. Our collective patience was tested and friendships were strained, but ultimately we emerged from the rawness of the desert with the biggest and best project of our lives, and memories that we will never forget.
Heaven Is Two Wheels
FINDING BLISS IN BIG SUR
Photography by Jack Antal | With quotes by Marcus Aurelius
Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than his own soul.
Confine yourself to the present.
What we do now echoes in eternity.
Your days are numbered. Use them to open the windows of your soul to the sun. Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars and see yourself running with them.
Riley Harper: Cool-Side
THE ENVIABLE LIFE OF RILEY HARPER
Words by Seth Richards | Photography by John Ryan Hebert
The danger of living an enviable life is that one day you may wake up and envy your own past.
The danger is greater still when your job is to document this life, to hold it in your hand and see it like so many pearls in a strand slipping through your fingers one opaline memory at a time – distinct yet connected until the strand ends, and the pearls transform from idyll to idol.
“Living in the past is really bad for you,” says Riley Harper. “But I fucking love it.”
Harper, a Hollywood stuntman, photographer, and accidental influencer, may run the risk of ruing his glorious past, but only because he’s made an art out of living in the moment.
Race week at Monaco. Negronis on a moonlit veranda. Aston Martins in Portofino. Triumphs in Tenerife. Sailing the Tyrrhenian Sea. Lipari. Cefalù. Corfu.
It makes flipping cars a grind.
Handsome, lucky, talented: You want to hate a guy like Harper for the gifts conferred on him by fortuitous fate, but you can’t begrudge him for making the most of them. A life so glamorous would seem a fiction, but where Hollywood’s unreality ends, Harper’s reality begins.
Growing up in Los Angeles, the son of a Hollywood stuntman and racer, Harper was raised on movie sets and in racing paddocks.
“I grew up watching On Any Sunday instead of cartoons,” he says. “I was in that kind of a household.”
One of his first big films was the cult classic Old School. In one of its most memorable scenes, Frank the Tank (Will Ferrell) shoots himself in the jugular with a tranquilizer dart at a children’s birthday party. Before toppling into the pool in a drugged-out stupor, he stumbles through a crowd of kids, sending one of them flying out of frame with a shove to the noggin. That was Harper, age eight or so.
His father was stunt coordinator on the film, so it was only natural Riley and younger brother Reid—who also grew up to be a professional stuntman—were enlisted for the scene.
Besides, Harper had been racing motocross since he was four years old, so he was accustomed to taking the occasional knock to the head. What’s a little push from a beloved Hollywood funny guy?
By the time he was a teenager, Harper had years of racing experience that equipped him for a future in stunts, to say nothing of genetic predisposition.
“Growing up racing, you have a certain way of how you think and how to take on things in a very fast-paced way,” Harper says. “That’s what you have to do with stunts. You have to make very rational decisions – motocross gives you that.”
Harper graduated high school at 16 and began booking stunt gigs straight away.
While his old schoolmates were sneaking out of the house at night to get a taste of freedom, Harper was away from home for months at a time, returning only for a few weeks out of the entire calendar year.
Since then, he’s traveled to more than 50 countries and appeared in around 200 productions, mostly big-budget films, including many of the Marvel films and the Dark Knight franchise. He’s worked with household names and legendary directors.
While doing stunts has been his ticket to the movies, so to speak, the attraction wasn’t merely in profiting from an adrenaline rush or from being part of the spectacle.
“I’ve always had a fascination with cameras. Still and motion,” Harper says. “I just loved shooting photos as a kid. I discovered [the photography of] Slim Aarons at a really young age. I saw the photos of American celebrities he was taking in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s in Europe, and those were the coolest images. It opened up a whole new part of my brain.”
Aarons famously said his work depicted “attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places.” His photographs are endlessly evocative and sumptuously stylish. His subjects, captured in the moment, live lives of leisure that look too perfect to be real.
Aarons’ influence on Harper is immediately recognizable in the images populating his Instagram profile, @lifeof_riley.
“Originally, it was a creative journal,” Harper says of his Instagram content. “I would look back at stuff from 2014 or something and say, ‘Man, I’ve done some cool stuff.’”
“[I work with] these old-school guys who are legends in the stunt and film industry and they didn’t understand what I was doing. They were like, ‘Why would you show this?’ It’s just fun for me. It’s fun to showcase creativity and what I think is cool. It’s a personal thing.”
Even before Instagram existed, Harper was borrowing friends’ cars and shooting photos for the fun of it. But what started out as a simple platform to share his photographs has morphed into something far different.
“Instagram opened up this world of opportunity,” Harper says. “Now, I have to divvy up my time and turn down stunt jobs that maybe aren’t ideal to do jobs that are personally more gratifying. I get to be creative, build relationships with really cool brands, and be my own boss. With stunts I’m just showing up and doing someone else’s vision. I’ve done that for so long and now this is a lot more fun for me. I love doing both, and I’ll never give up doing stunts, but it’s a really cool mesh of the two that I enjoy.”
Harper currently has 275,000 followers on Instagram and has worked with iconic and wide-ranging brands in the automotive, fashion, hotel and lifestyle industries.
When Aston Martin sets you up with wheels for a week, Tag Heuer gives you time to kill, and Polo Ralph Lauren thinks you make its tweed and chambray look good, you know you’re doing something right.
It’s plain to see why some of the coolest brands are itching to work with him. Harper wearing Ralph Lauren doesn’t make him look any cooler; it makes Ralph Lauren look cooler.
The Life of Riley is glamorous and daring and free-spirited. Riley jumping cars on the set of a major motion picture. Riley catching waves in Baja with his suntanned friends. Riley in the snowy Italian Alps riding a vintage Husqvarna with studded tires. Riley looking handsome in every damn shape of sunglasses he puts on. Riley on a yacht with his topless girlfriend, who’s a model.
None of that would be worth much to anyone if Harper didn’t have such a strong aesthetic. It’s not just about knowing how to capture it but having the eye to understand what to capture in the first place.
“I don’t care about girls with thongs on,” he says. “I want to see a really cool old house on the Mediterranean somewhere. It’s the sexiest thing you can see on Instagram.”
Harper’s subject matter brings back Slim Aarons. And with him comes the ineffable romance and glamour of the midcentury with which he’s associated.
“I’m a hopeless romantic,” Harper says. “I always have been. I don’t watch action movies; I watch weird Woody Allen movies. I love that shit. I chase the feeling more than the visual. I love seeing fat Italian dudes in Speedos on the beach playing checkers. That’s the coolest thing ever. That’s the stuff I stop for.”
Aarons brilliantly depicts the beautiful: the young, the affluent, the bare-chested countess reclining by the sea. Whatever the opposite of schadenfreude is, that’s what Aarons gives us: the pleasure of viewing someone else’s good fortune. Sort of the anti-Robert Frank, Aarons’s camera offers no critique.
In his presentation of the subject, the photographer has the choice, like Aarons, to remain silent, or, like Frank, to offer a perspective.
By often making his own life the subject, Harper enters the photograph’s meaning, forfeiting any hope of silence. When a photographer snaps a picture, it’s because he thinks the moment is worth recording. When he steps into the frame, it sets the photo up to be interpreted differently, as if he’s saying, “look at me.” The nature of Instagram as a medium means that viewers can choose to interpret that as phony or boastful – or something else entirely beyond Harper’s intention.
For another thing, it’s hard to imagine that a lot of people wanted to be Slim Aarons. But who wouldn’t want to be Harper?
He knows that people compare their lives to his. It’s only natural in our digital age. He’s sympathetic.
“This is a highlight reel,” Harper says. “I think some people seem to forget that. I always tell them, ‘Comparison will kill you.’ You’re only seeing the good shit. You don’t see the days where I’m on a movie set and I’ve knocked myself out and I’m in the ER getting stitches.”
“In the beginning of COVID I broke my back and collarbone. I was mountain biking with Troy Lee and Cole Seely. I was in ten weeks of physical therapy rehabbing my back and shoulder, and I didn’t post a single thing about it.”
For every one person who needs a reminder that what they see on Instagram is both real and not, Harper meets two who naturally discern his motives and take his content at face value.
Sitting at the coffee shop he goes to each morning near his home in LA, he’s approached by a stranger who says, “Are you Riley? Dude, you’re one of my biggest inspirations. I picked up photography because of you. I got my first motorcycle because of you.”
“That’s the coolest part, because I’ve used so many people for inspiration in my life,” Harper says.
Undoubtedly, the dude knows how to live. And what we see of his life, what he intentionally presents, is fodder for inspiration. @lifeof_riley is how-to-live porn. How to dress, where to go, how to relax, what to drink (Negronis. Always Negronis).
Knowing how to live a beautiful life and having the ability to achieve it, however, may not be what makes Harper most inspirational. It’s his perspective.
Looking at Aarons’ work now, it’s not so much the beauty that’s as striking as the feeling of nostalgia it provokes: Women are more elegant, men are more self-assured and upright, the parties are more glamorous, and all that was seems more real than all that is.
Nostalgia, in that light, is seductive and dangerous: What seems to be true rarely is, and the feeling it inspires is as fleeting as the illusion itself.
“I understand nostalgia is technically a bad thing, like in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris,” Harper says. “I never used to think of it that way. I love looking back at things. Who doesn’t like reminiscing? About an old relationship, an old friend, an old fling, a place you’ve been.
“My way of thinking is: Take the inspiration from something you did before, kill it, move on, and use it for what’s right in front of you.”
In the digital realm, that’s the spirit behind his other Instagram account, @nostalgia.killer, which he uses as a personal inspiration board. Plastered with photos of McQueen in old Porsches, graciously set tables on the terraces of Italian villas, and lesser-known Aarons shots, one imagines Harper sees it the same way he hopes others look at @lifeof_riley.
Kill it. Move on. Use it.
Maybe he isn’t so much a nostalgia killer as much as a nostalgia conqueror. He can look through the lens of a romanticized past, evade its snare of sentimentality, and cast a vision for living in the present. More than everything else, maybe it’s this ability that makes Harper’s life so enviable.
It’s all a matter of perspective.
The number of followers doesn’t matter. Comparisons are meaningless. 1960 isn’t more real than 2022.
“You are the hero of your own story. You really are,” Harper says. “That’s fucking life. If Instagram goes away tomorrow, I’m doing the same thing.”
Trendsetting in Top Siders. Night rides in the Santa Monica Mountains. Bonnies from ’69 and Porsche 912s. Taormina. Sanremo. Gréolières.
VAHNA SP/22 Collection
THE NEXT CHAPTER OF META
Volume 025 / Spring 2022
META-Morphosis
VOLUME 025 / SPRING 2022
Words and photo by Ben Giese
the winds of change are eternal
as mountains rise
and fall back into the sea
with the tides of time
strangers, visitors, passengers
for a moment under the sun
until the wind blows
to make room for something new
the caterpillar must die
so the butterfly can spread its wings
and drift off into new dreams
vibrant, rare and beautiful
a new flame
a summer bloom
the next great horizon
and the wind will blow