In 2001, Dewi Lewis Publishing issued *Bikers*, a large-format hardback by the German photographer Andreas Endemann. The subject is plain from the title, but the book’s method is not: Endemann spent a single summer travelling Britain in the company of motorcyclists, moving with them from one meet to the next rather than summoning them to a studio. The resulting photographs are hand-tinted, a process that gives the plates an unusually warm, worked surface and separates them from the documentary plainness typical of the genre.

The riders and their machines share the page. Machines from Triumph, Ducati, Moto Guzzi, BMW, Harley-Davidson and B.S.A. appear as more than props, and the people photographed are presented as individuals rather than as specimens of a subculture. Across its eighty colour plates, the book records a way of life its subjects have chosen and, in some cases, organised their lives around. The sequence follows the rhythm of the season and the circuit of gatherings, so that the book reads as a sustained encounter rather than a portfolio of isolated portraits.

The square 295mm format and the decision to reproduce eighty plates at that scale matter to the book’s character. It is a large, deliberate object, and the tinting rewards the size, holding detail in both the machines and the faces. *Bikers* remains a distinctive photographic account of British motorcycle culture, and its combination of immersion and craft is difficult to repeat; the closeness Endemann achieved is a product of time spent as much as of access.

Collectors of British documentary photography and of photographic treatments of motorcycle culture should note the book for those reasons: a defined body of work coherently edited, printed at a scale its images require, and made by a photographer who stayed long enough to be trusted.