Robert Mann Gallery, in conjunction with George Adams Gallery, is pleased to announce two exhibitions of photographs by Doug Biggert. The exhibition encompasses portraits of hitchhikers Biggert has picked up on his travels, predominately along I-80 and Route 49 in Northern California beginning in the early 1970s. The George Adams Gallery exhibition will also include a second series, featuring patrons who frequented Socrates Sandal shop, where Biggert worked, on West Balboa Boulevard in Newport Harbor, CA, from 1968-1972. Over forty snapshots from the Hitchhikers series – which runs to approximately 450 images over almost three decades – will be on view across both galleries. In addition, a small cross-section of the Sandal Shop images will be presented at George Adams Gallery, along with a documentary short produced about the artist, Beautiful America, from 2008.

Starting around 1973, Biggert began hosting a twice-weekly late-night jazz program at KVMR, a radio station out of Nevada City, CA. Driving his green VW Bug on his commute to and from San Francisco and later Sacramento, he began picking up hitchhikers for company and taking informal portraits of his passengers. Biggert continued this practice for decades, keeping the photos in a binder in the VW to show his would-be subjects by way of explaining his motives. Over the years the project expanded well beyond his regular commute through the Gold Country with the result that these snapshot portraits capture not only an itinerant population of young teens, college kids, tourists and down and outers, but also the look of an evolving America from the ‘70s onward. For decades Biggert has been drawn to the margins of society; his photographic impulses have led him to document countless examples of the kind of visual placeholders that have long signified subcultures such as graffiti, bumper stickers and hand-painted street signs. In life, as in his art, his boundless curiosity is as much the connoisseur’s as the cataloguer, where images are just one facet of the collections he has amassed. Yet while Biggert rarely sought to create a record of a time or a place, by simply being present, he offers an insight into a kind of alternative lifestyle that so defined a generation and a region.

Doug Biggert was born in Evanston, Illinois in 1941 and raised in St Louis, MO, where he attended Principia College and later graduated from Washington University. His first exposure to photography was as a child, when given a camera by his aunt though he didn’t begin photographing in earnest until he was living in California, with the Sandal Shop series. By nature a wanderer, Biggert himself first 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 first in Balboa, in Orange County, later moving to San Francisco and then Sacramento. The urge to explore never left him however. By his own admission, Biggert has visited all fifty states, in part through his own wanderlust but also through his role as the manager of global 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, sometimes supporting publishers directly to see an issue produced.

Please contact Robert Mann Gallery to arrange a viewing, or view the exhibition online, from March 31, 2022 - May 27, 2022. For additional information and press materials, please contact the gallery by email (mail@robertmann.com). 

The George Adams Gallery exhibition, Hitchhikers and a Sandal Shop, will be on view through May 7, 2022 at 38 Walker St, New York, NY 10013. Please contact the gallery at 212.564.8480 or info@georgeadamsgallery.com for more information.

MUSEÉ MAGAZINE: APRIL 25

EXHIBITION REVIEW: DOUG BIGGERT: HITCHIKERS AND A SANDAL SHOP

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.

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i-D VICE: APRIL 12

PHOTOGRAPHING HUSTLERS, HIPPIES AND DRIFTERS IN 1960S CALIFORNIA

DOUG BIGGERT SHOT THE HITCHHIKERS HE ENCOUNTERED DRIVING HIS GREEN 1966 VW BUG ACROSS THE STATE.

BY MISS ROSEN

By 1968, the Socrates Sandals shop in Newport Harbor, California, had become a favourite destination for Orange County's bubbling counterculture. Here, hippies, surfers, students, blue-collar workers, and radicals of all stripes found kinship in the otherwise conservative SoCal town. Driven to document the random encounters he had throughout the day, store clerk Doug Biggert began photographing customers with a Kodak Instamatic.

Doug displayed the small format snapshots in the store, which was as idiosyncratic as the customers it drew. Every receipt bore the legend, "Call before you come. We're not open all the time," reflecting the go-with-the-flow vibe of the times that Doug embodied. Over a five-year period, he was able to amass some 2,000 portraits, forming a visual record of everyday life in the all-American beachfront town.

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