via South Africa

photographs from the Bicycle Portraits project

I recently received a nice message from photographer Stan Engelbrecht, who is working on the lovely Bicycle Portraits project - documenting South Africans who use bicycles in their day-to-day existence - while drawing attention to the lack of cyclist commuters on South African roads.

Stan Engelbrecht (Cape Town, South Africa) and Nic Grobler (Johannesburg, South Africa) are raising funds to turn this project (via Kickstarter) into a self-published full-color hard-cover photographic book...

"As you might know, South Africa is a world within one country, home to various cultures, with a tragic history of segregation and racism. Through this project we hope to give people a glimpse into each other lives through a well known object of movement, practicality and joy - the bicycle. Looking at individuals through their, sometimes unconscious, involvement in bicycle culture, we will inadvertently touch on many charged issues like the implementation of public space, lack of infrastructure development and also social problems like class division and unequal wealth distribution, but also perhaps bring those unfamiliar to each other together in their love for a simple thing...

Through publishing this book, we want to be able to assist the underprivileged cycling community through our project - be it teaching bicycle maintenance skills, providing necessities like helmets, tires, tubes, locks… Ultimately we want to promote cycling as a means of independent transport to empower the underprivileged, and in fact, to encourage everyone capable to ride a bike as an alternative to driving a car, or even using public transport. We hope that this will lead to the kind of infrastructure development that is designed with all people in mind, not just cars."

You can donate to the project and learn more [here]... I also really enjoy the inclusion of photographs documenting children and their bicycles...