Robert Mann Gallery & George Adams Gallery are saddened to announce the passing of Doug Biggert (1941-2023)
Born in Evanston, Illinois in 1941 and raised in St Louis, MO, Biggert attended Principia College and later graduated from Washington University. His first exposure to photography was as a child, though he didn’t begin photographing in earnest until 1968 when he began the Sandal Shop series while living in California. A wanderer by nature, Biggert hitchhiked through the southwest as a teenager and around Europe during a summer abroad while in college. He eventually found his way to California, living in Balboa, Orange County, San Francisco, and finally Sacramento.
The urge to explore never left him, however. Biggert visited all fifty states, through his own wanderlust and his role as the manager of distribution of magazines for Tower Records, a position he held from 1978 until 1999. In this capacity, Biggert was hugely influential in improving distribution and exposure for a nascent Zine scene.
Biggert’s first solo museum exhibition, A Sandalshop Wall, was held at the Newport Harbor Museum (now the Orange County Museum of Art) in 1972. In 2007, in conjunction with exhibitions in Paris and Brussels, Michael Husson published a selection of Biggert's photographs, Hitch-Hikers, and in 2008 Biggert was the subject of the documentary Beautiful America produced by Xavier Carcelle and Chloé Colpé. In 2009, the Verge Center for the Arts, Sacramento, exhibited BIGGERT'S Hitchhikers and Other Work and the following year he was given his first New York solo exhibition, White Room: Doug Biggert, at White Columns.
Biggert’s seminal Hitchhikers series, a collection of unique prints, nearly 450 images spanning across three decades that documented an extraordinary time and place in American culture, were presented in simultaneous exhibitions at the Robert Mann Gallery and George Adams Gallery New York in 2022.
