Moped Taiwan

moped Taiwan

This show is about the motion and beauty of the moped culture in Taiwan, which I saw while traveling in December 2014.  Everyone from grandmothers to lovers and cool cats to cops seem to make use of mopeds as a convenient and relatively inexpensive mode of transportation, and helmets and the bikes themselves are often customized, suggesting a beloved extension of one's self.  Unlike the chaotic streets of Vietnam, Taiwan's motorists are quite orderly, and the streets are brilliantly laid out in ways that make it all seem effortless (for example, separate zones for cars and mopeds at stoplights, allowing the motorcycles an opportunity to pass through the cars, minimizing congestion and the risk of accidents).

All images were photographed with a Leica M9, which, as a rangefinder-type camera, is ideal for tracking the movements of motorists while using a slow shutter-speed to highlight the sense of motion and render backgrounds as abstractions.