EXHIBITION REVIEW: DOUG BIGGERT: HITCHIKERS AND A SANDAL SHOP
Doug Biggert shot the hitchhikers he encountered driving his green 1966 VW Bug across the state.
By Megan May Walsh
Strangers carry a certain allure to them. They each have a story, a story yet to be known or a story imagined for them by fellow strangers. Perhaps they are lost souls wandering the ends of the Earth to discover a greater purpose awaiting them or perhaps they are adventure-seekers hoping to discover a new marvel of the natural world. The possibilities and complexity are endless, and photographer Doug Biggert made it his project to collect the possibilities and complexities of strangers’ stories.
The George Adams Gallery with the Robert Mann Gallery are displaying the wanderlust-esque of Doug Biggert’s work. The exhibition consists of two great bodies of work by Biggert, Hitchhikers and Sandal Shop, each of which documents encounters over the course of years. Hitchhikers is a series of portraits Biggert collected on his travels along I 80 and Route 49 in Northern California beginning in the early 1970s. Sandal Shop is mainly portraits of patrons that frequented Socrates Sandal shop on West Balboa Boulevard in Newport Harbor, CA, from 1968-1972.