Vengeance

Process Diary

Same bike, three ways, stacked until they stop being separate photographs. Up top I kept the honest ones: the dusk shot with the sign burning behind it, the hand laid flat over the tank so the tribal ink and the flame pinstripe sit in the same skin, the headlight at night. Then the middle band is the same machine taken apart and rebuilt in pixels — no camera in it at all, every chrome line and spoke placed by hand, which is the only part of this that is really mine. VENGEANCE at the bottom, the V bleeding red and the rest stencilled in white so the word reads like it was sprayed on after the fact. I wanted the lettering to land like a stamp on a page that already had too much on it. That is what editing is: choosing which of the truths stays on top.