I was in Oakland, Ca leaving a pre-screening of a new photo documentary from Adobe Create, “Ride Slow. Take Pictures.” and, while walking to the Telegraph Beer Garden for a bit of post-show photo nerdery with some members of the East Bay Photo Collective, I was saying to my friend that I was going to be writing this feature about the film’s subject. She joked that I should title this piece, “Erik Mathy: WHY?????”, drawing out the long y and flailing her arms. Relating this story to Erik later, we laughed about the absurd accuracy of it. Now whenever he pulls out his latest Frankensteined camera or goes off about some new scheme there is the inevitable shout of “WHY????” It is not a question without merit, however. Why would someone cobble together lenses held together with dollar bills? Why would someone make a shutter that operates by rubber bands? Why would someone set out on a bicycle for a 1,200 mile journey with little more than an old Graflex and some x-ray film? But when talking with Erik one tends to get swept up in his contagious enthusiasm for his newest gadget or latest off-the-wall idea. So much so that it’s not until later when you regain your senses that you sit back and ask yourself, “but why?”

Erik does not seem to be a person who does things by halves, but rather someone who jumps in gung-ho, all-in, with no looking back. There's an obvious passion inherent to his nature which he directs into his pursuits. He is an inveterate tinkerer, gadget maker, and problem solver. When faced with the harsh financial reality that in the Bay Area, even with a good job, the latest rent increase would shrink his monthly photo budget down to $30, including lab fees, he got resourceful. The vintage brass lenses he was lusting over were now out of reach, but, rather than retreating in despair, he figured out how to recreate them himself. “The lens design is really simple, it's two acromats and a tube, pretty much. I found the math and figured, I can do that. The first one I got completely wrong, but the second one I got the math right and built a functional two-element lens and the results started to be something I really liked. You know how when you shoot something and emotionally it feels right? Where you look at a shot you've done and say 'that's right, this is home, this is the shot I wanted.' It was like that. And the dollar bill was a little bit of Fuck You performance art.” So now instead of saving up five or six months of his budget for a brass lens, he was making his own lenses with less than $10 in glass and four $1 bills. Each hand-made lens has it’s own character, funky and distorted, and no two are exactly alike, which is just the way he likes it.

Erik describes himself as “a photographer with a cycling problem.” He bought his first bike from a pawn shop when he moved to the Bay Area and was in need of cheap and efficient transportation. As enthusiasts are often drawn to other enthusiasts, he caught the cycling bug from the friends he made at the bike shop. This new-found passion soon led to him participating in bike rides for cancer charities, including Team in Training for the Lymphoma Society and a cross-country ride from Seattle to DC in support of the American Lung Association. Since then nearly every project he does involves some sort of fundraising aspect. Having originally studied photojournalism, this active involvement in charitable projects inspired the current direction of his photography, as well. “I wanted to get back to making more meaningful work that might have more impact than just taking pretty pictures.” The first major project he embarked on combining his two passions was a 30 day trip covering the entirety of Route 66 (It winds from Chicago to LA/More than 2000 miles all the way), riding an average of 85 miles a day with a shooting budget of four 4x5 sheets of lith film per day. Crossing a large portion of the country in a contentious political and social climate, he wanted to make it a trip of connection, to interact with folks along the way, and create moments of friendship and humanity with the people he met.

Once he recovered from Route 66 he began itching for a new project. If Route 66 was the first great interstate of the automotive age, what roads had preceded it? His research led him to the Butterfield Overland Mail Route. In service from 1858-1861 (predating the Pony Express), it carried passengers and U.S. Mail from St. Louis to San Francisco via the Southwestern deserts and Los Angeles. Working backwards along the route from San Francisco, he calculated how far he could go with the time he could take off from work and settled on reaching Tuscon in 20 days. This would put him on course to average riding 65 miles a day and give him and extra hour or two for photographing and conducting interviews on the way. 

He was in the midst of planning this next long-distance photo journey when a chance meeting occurred while riding up a hill in Berkeley. Erik was leaving Looking Glass Photo, where he had been developing film, and his bike was loaded up with gear, including cameras and a tripod. Traffic necessitated riding side by side with another cyclist and they began chatting. “He started talking about the documentary films he makes, and then he asked about the gear I had, so I told him about my project and he said, 'That's really cool, if you're into it I'd love to do a doc on that...Oh, sorry, my name is Dan Cowles, I work for Adobe Create.' We stop at the top of the hill and I show him the images I had just developed because I was thinking that he wasn't going to like it. They work with famous people, people who shoot covers for Time, and I am...not that.” But, soon enough, phone calls were made, production meetings scheduled, and a fortuitous encounter on the side of the road was turning into a movie.

The first order of business on a trip like this is to sort out the necessities of human existence: food; water; safe shelter. It was in mapping out his daily schedule that an important aspect of the final project became apparent. “I started thinking about current events because on the second day I was looking at places to stay near Dos Palos. There were no campgrounds, but sometimes ranches or farms will let you stay if you ask nicely. There was a farm I found on the map called Koda Farms, and, on investigating, it I learned it was the oldest Japanese rice farm in the US. They lost everything in WWII when the family were all sent off to internment camps and were forced to give their farm to a white farmer. When they got back after the war everything was decimated. They were eventually able to restart and buy back the family's original land. It made me think about the current issues at the border, the family separation policy, the stuff that we keep repeating because we don't learn the lessons.” Further along the route are two other locations crucial to the Japanese-American experience in WWII: The Gila River Indian Community where there was a wartime relocation camp; and a former hard-labor camp where the government sent conscientious objectors, such as Quakers, as well as Japanese-Americans who fought the relocation act in court, where they were forced to forge mountain roads with pick-axes.

Originally thinking the trip would involve the relatively mundane tasks of finding the old stage stops and other period specific artifacts, it turned into a journey looking at the history of the west through the lens of current events. Erik says, “I started looking for people to talk to along the way about these issues. I talked to a lawyer here in San Francisco that does immigration work for migrant children (The lawyer works in support of the non-profit effort Kids in Need of Defense, which became the recipient of Erik’s fundraising efforts) and then to get the opposite side of the topic I interviewed border patrol agents in Calexico. I wanted to see what would happen if I talked to people about real things, even if they didn't agree with me. We're not having discussions, especially on social media, we're just yelling.” 

Filmmaker Dan Cowles is always on the lookout for stories involving the creative process that he can translate into a cinematic experience. With all the elements involved in Erik's prospective project his interest was piqued right away. He says, “Erik's trip that included a pretty intense creative endeavor, plus an interesting photography story with his dollar bill lenses, plus a bunch of other interesting creative people, plus topical and relevant subject matter, all added up to make a compelling story for me and Adobe Create.” And when it came time to hit the road, Dan also found himself in need of a break after wrapping up a few high-pressure projects. What better to reset the creative spirit than a road trip? While the larger crew of three to five people would drop in at key points, Dan drove to Tuscon by himself, shadowing Erik much of the time. As a result of Dan's presence through most of the trip there was far more footage in the end than there would usually be for a short film.

Although the project was initially concieved as a short artist feature, the film ended up encompassing a much larger story as well as a longer run time. “The upshot was that when we got back, we had a story that was best told chronologically, and we had a ton of footage. Plus, to me, the story is as much about the people Erik meets as it is about his trip and we wanted to include that to show the breadth of the experience. We definitely didn't set out to make a feature film, but by the time we were done shooting, we kind of had no choice. It would have been a shame to try to capture the trip in a short piece, we couldn't have done it justice.”

The first portrait shoot of the first morning was chaotic. It was just before dawn, Erik was simultaneously exhausted and excited, flustered by the presence of the crew, and rushing to get through his the interview before the subject had to leave and he had to make the ferry to San Francisco for his second appointment. This led to a crucial error that nearly derailed the whole day: his number one lens was missing. Somehow left behind in packing up the first shoot, it was now gone. A frantic call to his fiancee was made. We meet Heather at the beginning of the film, seeing him off in the pre-dawn, and now she comes riding to the rescue through the morning traffic bearing back-up elements and supplies to make a new set of apertures. Talking about this incident later, Erik tells me, “A lot of things work out because I have Heather. Full stop.” I also asked Heather about what happened when she got that phone call: “Honestly? I laughed and then realized he must be devastated. I knew how much Erik loved the lens he had brought and also knew that the new one would be different somehow. He had worked so hard for this project, and feeling a first blow that was so big and so early broke my heart. I also knew that starting low means things can only improve and get better, so I tried to relay that to him as an offer of hope and confidence.”

It is easy to stay close to the original path of the Butterfield route, as many portions were converted over time to auto roads and highways, some even keeping the Butterfield name. Along this route Erik found no shortage of stories, as he told me: “There are stories wherever you look, you just have to search for them. You have to poke around and chase leads, but they're there.” Outside of Bakersfield he met a woman who was born at Weedpatch Camp, the dust-bowl era migrant housing camp that Steinbeck used for the setting of The Grapes of Wrath. The camp is still in use by Kern County to house migrant labor, only now the people looking for work are arriving from the southern border instead of Oklahoma.

Along the way Erik met with artists, activists, farmers, anyone willing to share their story. He scheduled fourteen interviews in advance, the rest came about by chance encounter. One such happened while he was leaving his campsite in Dateland, Arizona and chatting to the store clerk. As he bought food for the day she said, “Oh, you should stop by the fish farm.” Though it was slightly off course, he wasn't about to miss the opportunity to talk to someone who, as unlikely as it sounds, raises fish in the middle of a desert. There he found Tark Rush, a native of the Yuma Valley who, after many years of being a shrimper, moved back home knowing he could utilize the naturally brackish water of the area to farm shrimp. After 9/11 the market dropped out for luxury food items and he switched to farming tilapia, growing salt hay, and raising goats using sustainable farming practices. Rush is pragmatic about the need for migrant labor for rural industry, and wonders why we are paying hundreds of dollars a day to incarcerate them when businesses like his can pay them a fair wage to do the work they came to do and sponsor them for legal immigration.

The original course of the Butterfield Overland Mail Route dipped south of the border into Mexico so as to bypass a section of Arizona desert that was blocked by impassable sand dunes. Asking if he had thought about including this border crossing as part of his ride he said, “I really wanted to go into Mexico, but everything I read about the state of Mexicali right now...it's a really desperate place.” Not only would it have been a potentially dangerous proposition for a white guy carrying 40 pounds of camera and camping gear on a bicycle, Adobe would have had to hire security to protect the film crew and their expensive equipment. Instead Erik visited the border wall, a dark fence stretching out through the desolate desert landscape. He was checked out by a border patrol truck as he photographed the wall, ruefully noting later that being white and surrounded by a film crew made it a low-pressure encounter.

A year to the day prior to the film screening in Oakland, Erik was at the Gila River Indian Community, the Pima reservation outside of Phoenix. He was talking to Paul Molina and watching young men on skateboards, the skate ramps being shielded from the relentless sun by a metal canopy. Molina is an artist, designer, community activist, and a native of the GIRC. He is the co-founder of the skate company Seven Layer Army, seven being the number of layers of veneer on a skateboard and the number of districts on the reservation. Molina returned to the reservation because he wanted to give back to his community and uses skateboarding as a form of youth outreach. Every kid that shows up is given a board and is  gifted not only a form of recreation but, even more importantly, a sense of comradery. There's a joy in that moment where the boys are showing off their skills for the camera, working collaboratively with Erik so he can make his best shot. In addition to holding regular skate tournaments, Molina’s long term plan includes building a skate park in each of the seven districts of the GIRC.

By the last few days of the trip we can see the toll it's taking on Erik. He gets sick and is barely holding it together with cold medicine and Ricola and is struggling to breathe, but stopping or delaying is not an option. On the final day when he pauses to look at the map he is astonished to see there's only 20 miles to go and is reenergized by adrenaline and the endorphin rush of knowing he's almost made it to the end. He says, “it was this surreal moment because I was in so much pain and the wind was hard and I was struggling, and then I felt great because I was so stoked.” We see him arrive at Lil Abners Steak House in Tuscon, which was once a stopping point for the Butterfield Mail Route. The walls of the building are covered with thousands of scrawled signatures and notes from previous visitors. Erik pulls out a sharpie and adds his credo for this trip: Ride Slow. Take Pictures. He makes his final image of the trip and then sets off the last few miles to a friend's house when the pain and fatigue hits him again. He spends the next three days there sleeping and recuperating. 

We hear snippets of his phone calls home over the course of the film, and I wonder what it's like for Heather, being too far away to provide anything other than brief minutes of moral support. She told me “I love that he does these trips because he is inspired and happy throughout the process. It lasts for a year or more after the adventure - which is amazing! The fact that he is impacting the way stories are conveyed and his personal views is inspiring and uplifting. Physically, I have had to re-emphasize to him that these trips are for personal growth and enjoyment, so pushing himself to a place where he is uncomfortable or in jeopardy is literally the opposite of the objective. Sometimes I need to be really, really firm about this - but he did an amazing job this round so everything that has come from it has been positive and growth oriented. What more could one ask for in terms of the people they love? My role is to check his ambitions and goals and keep him on track to make these adventures fun instead of stressful.”

I mention to Erik how the way this project fell together almost seemed fated, particularly the randomness of way he met Dan which ended up in the film being made. He shakes his head at this thought. “I used to believe in luck but as I've gotten older and had to own up to my own shortcomings I realized that you make your own luck, good or bad. If you work hard and keep plugging away at it, sooner or later good things happen because you've put in that effort. I could have chosen to take the flat ride home that day, I could have chosen not to go to Looking Glass, I could have chosen not to build my own lenses… So in a sense it was a bit of luck that Dan was out riding that day, but I've busted my balls to be in a position for something like that to happen.”

It's a winter night in San Francisco and Erik and I are sitting in the balcony of a cafe, watching people scurry by outside in the rain through a veil of holiday lights. Every time we've met he is always fidgeting with a camera, making parenthetical asides to himself as he tries to capture an image; my voice memos are filled with interruptions of him muttering “stay right there” or the sound of a shutter clicking and the exclamation of “I got that guy!” Erik's habit of thinking out loud made Dan’s job easier because there was no need for him to add any other narration to the film; Erik naturally provides his own soundtrack, continuously talking out his actions and singing snippets of songs. There is a constant flow of thought and action about him. It's when I ask my final question of “Why?” that he stills and becomes pensive as he looks out at the rain. “Why? To keep my sanity. I don't know if I could stay sane or survive this thing – modern life, or whatever – without this kind of output. I don't know that I have a conscious choice, it's just who and what I am. I could say it's because I want to make my mark, or make the world a better place, but the chances are solidly against that ever happening. But I don't know what else to be; there's a lot of not knowing. Heather and I joke that I'm like Don Quioxte, tilting at windmills. And if I go out penniless and alone, or if I do some good, either way I've made the effort. I just have to go out punching, I guess.”

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

To watch the trailer for “Ride Slow. Take Pictures.” visit Adobe Create by clicking here!

Connect with Erik Mathy on his Website and on Instagram!

For more information on the Kids In Need of Defense, which provides pro-bono legal representation for children in immigration court, click here!

GALLERY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Niniane Kelley is a fine art photographer living and working in San Francisco and Lake County, California. A native of the Bay Area, she is a San Jose State University graduate, earning a BFA in Photography in 2008. She teaches workshops in the Bay Area and surrounding environs. She most recently worked as a photographer and manager at San Francisco’s tintype portrait studio, Photobooth. Connect with Niniane Kelley on her Website and on Instagram!

RELATED ARTICLES