Sullivan Brittain - I Love My Bike

Matt and I love everything about bicycles. It is no small coincidence that we met on a bike ride with mutual friends one of the few clear summer nights in Boston during a month when it poured down rain twenty-two of thirty days. From that night on, our sense of adventure took us anywhere we could imagine on our bikes. We would wake up very early every morning before work to meet up with a group of friends and ride to get coffee and breakfast somewhere we had never been, and punctuated our days with late-night rides to Castle Island or Walden Pond or through the desolate streets of downtown Boston in the wee hours of the morning. It was one of the most memorable summers of our lives, filled end to end with journeys through beautiful landscapes and with good company.
We didnt want it to end, but the days started to get shorter, the temperature became cooler, and our familiar bike routes began to look a little less green. For Matt and me, our shared excitement for all things cycling was only surpassed by the great friends that we met along the way.

It was then that we thought to combine our skills and love of bicycles, and we set out to travel the country photographing people and their bikes.
This book is not about a singular style of bike or type of cycling but rather about all of us in a grand kinship of bicycles. We wanted to capture the strength, willpower, and grit, as well as the creativity, sense of humor, and whimsy of riding a bike.
Matt and I began photographing our cycling friends around Boston and taking short treks to New Hampshire, New York City, and Philadelphia to track down people riding their bikes. We met so many great people on these first trips. Almost everyone we stopped and asked to pose with his or her bicycle answered, I love my bike!our sentiment exactly!
Throughout our travelseventually we made it all the way west to Pacific Coast cities from Portland to Los AngelesMatt and I have had the tremendous pleasure of being in the company of many people of great importance to their respective cycling cultures, but they stand side by side with a community of people who are, quite simply, cyclists like us. In each city and town that we visited, people shared with us their earliest recollections of learning to ride a bike, and we were led through all of the windy streets and back roads or alleys, over terrain familiar only to a cyclist who spends many days committing them to muscle-memory. The journey was greater than anything we could have imagined: we had so much fun meeting cyclists of all ages and backgrounds, geeking-out on bike components, and also taking in a few solitary moments with the landscape of the places we found ourselves.
Matt and I set out to find fellow enthusiasts of humankinds greatest invention.

What we found were friends whom we hope to know for a lifetimealong with their bicycles.
Brittain Sullivan