Many thanks for Suzanne Sease who featured Thomas Chadwick’s personal project “The Messengers” on her blog, The Art of the Personal Project.
“In my younger days, before I moved to the States, I used to ride. I was part of the Corinium Cycling club, rode open road time trials & trained almost year-round. During the colder months, I would venture out less often & stuck to riding rollers in my garage. I never did particularly well in the colder weather.
That’s why one day, on my way back home from work early in my time in Chicago, on a bitterly cold February evening, I came across a messenger packing his bike into the back of his car. It blew my mind that he would even consider riding in these frigid & snowy conditions. As I quizzed him about why on earth, he would choose to ride his bike in these temperatures, he told me he was a bike messenger & that he liked working in the winter months as only the most committed riders went out in these months & it meant more work & better pay. I remember him saying anyone can be a messenger in the summer, but the cold had a way of whittling out those who weren’t serious.
That encounter left an impression on me & respect for those riders who I would see braving the cold & the traffic downtown.
My further introduction to the World of Bike Messengers came when Redbull hired me to photograph Nico Deportago-Cabrera at the NACCC (the North American Cycle Courier Championships). There I got a glimpse of the world of the sense of family, camaraderie & style that links the participants together. It was the sense of community, the dress sense, and the tattoos that really drew me in. The tattoos were awesome!
That following year, through Nico, I put a call out to Chicago messengers to stop by a studio I rented for the day if they wanted to have their portrait taken. It was late winter & still bitterly cold outside & the messengers that had impressed me so when I first arrived in the country were the ones who turned up.”
