Photographer Peter Kraiker on his Pedal with Passion exhibition
Peter Kraiker "just loves cycling." Or so he told me at the opening of his first solo exhibition—Pedal with Passion—at the Leonardo Galleries in an oddly quiet Yorkville neighbourhood in Toronto on Saturday afternoon. The show is part of Toronto’s prestigious Contact Photography Festival.
by Larry Humber
Peter Kraiker “just loves cycling.” Or so he told me at the opening of his first solo exhibition—Pedal with Passion—at the Leonardo Galleries in an oddly quiet Yorkville neighbourhood in Toronto on Saturday afternoon. The show is part of Toronto’s prestigious Contact Photography Festival.
Kraiker’s spouse, Andrea Bowker, was also on hand for the opening. She is just as enamored of the sport. They’ve toured extensively, too—one shot pictures a fully loaded bike with Bowker in the saddle as she forges ahead of her partner while riding in Colorado.
Cycling buffs may recognize some of the other subjects, snapped at events both in Canada and abroad. An especially memorable shot shows Team Sky’s (he was then with the German team Milram) Christian Knees tumbling head over heels after he was struck by a rival team car. “Happily, he got up and rode on,” Kraiker confirmed. Knees, a domestique, had just come from collecting water for his teammates and one of the bottles is still in the air and spilling its contents. There’s a Coke can hovering just over the pavement, too. “I think that was for him,” Kraiker said.
There are several black-and-white photos among the collection, a notable one taken at the Alpe d’Huez during the scandal-plagued 2006 Tour de France, titled “Will it Be You or Me?” It shows a pair of riders in a two-man breakaway to the top, one addressing the other, his tongue flapping. Maybe he should have negotiated further, as it was the other rider—Frank Schleck, no less—who took the stage. That was the infamous Tour that saw several contenders expelled early, and then race winner Floyd Landis stripped of the title. “I remember sitting in a cafe in Paris a few days later when all the papers had the headline ‘Busted,’” Kraiker added.
Another seemingly more innocent shot that enticed gallery goers is titled “The Triomphe of Cycling,” taken in Paris in 2010. It pictures a nattily-attired woman cyclist half hidden by a bus as they circle the roundabout at the Arc de Triomphe. “I actually took that photograph from a bike,” Kraiker said. “It’s six lanes of traffic that’s absolute chaos. It’s not for the faint of heart, though it does slow at times.”
The show runs till May 15, so there’s still plenty of time to hoof it over.
