Grant Petersen Profile

There's a nice article in the September 23rd issue of The New Yorker about Grant Petersen, of Rivendell Bicycle Works, in Walnut Creek, California, East of Berkeley. Grant used to be a TOP reader. He commented for a period of time, and when I was modifying my Trek bike, Gruesome, he kindly sent me a pair of albatross handlebars to use. I haven't seen Grant around here for a number of years, most likely because...well, perhaps for the same reason I never talk about bicycles; he already has a hobby. Although he is pictured on the Rivendell website hiding his face behind a camera!

Alas, Gruesome languishes in my garage. She isn't worth anything more than peanuts and would take some work to make roadworthy again, so there she sits.

Rivendell Roaduno

But maybe there's a lot we can learn from Grant's attitude toward cycling. He bucks the trends, and isn't in favor of taking tech so fake-seriously. You know, the culture of weekend cyclists wearing racing gear and riding fragile ultra-lightweight racing bikes. I see them pass by here on the Lake road all the time. (They're the only denizens of the Lake road too serious to wave back when they pass you! Although a few of them do.) You'd think it was all about the getup and the gear. His company builds steel-framed bikes with upright handlebars and comfortable seats. He thinks cycling should be fun and part of normal life. A way to go to the grocery store and go to work and get from here to there.

It occurred to me that there's a lot there we could pull out of the article and apply to photographing. Primarily, that it's not really that big a deal. I've noticed over the years that a lot of ambitious people get serious about photography for a while, put time and effort into creating a body of work, find that it earns them just about nothing in terms of money, respect, renown or other reward, and then migrate to other, more sensible ways of occupying their time—while at the same time continuing to enjoy photography in a more casual and continuing way.

There's nothing wrong with that. Photography is fun; it improves your relationship with the world and with people, it provides you with reminders of your path through your days. Your occasional "hits," when everything works and you get a nice result, well, those occasions can be wonderfully satisfying. You don't need the photographic equivalent of the spandex costume and the carbon-fiber bike frame. You can just have a nice camera that you keep in good tune and don't mind taking along with you when you go places.

It might be true (as well as ironic) that we can increase our engagement and involvement with photography by taking it more casually and relaxing about it more. Photographs are as numerous as raindrops or snowflakes and most of them last about as long. Getting out with a camera is a way of having fun, a means of poking about the world and seeing it better, a way of meeting and engaging with people. What it's not so great at, unless you really work at it and are bursting with energy and blessed with business skills, is helping you make a living or become famous as an artist.

Check out that article about Grant (I think it's available to non-subscribers, though I'm not sure—you'll have to let me know) and see if any of it applies to photography for you. It made me think, anyway, and that's not easy to do.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

David Blankenhorn: "Like motorcycling, bicycling is actually multiple sports with multiple tribes following the different types of machines, one tribe for each type of machine. And it’s seemingly a much bigger gap between them than between Fujifilm camera aficionados and, say, Sony users. Or Leica vs. everybody else. Even in the days of film. Mr. Peterson is the avatar of one of the smaller bike tribes."

John Bennett: "I have known Grant for two and a half decades, and I would say the biggest misunderstanding about him is that he dislikes e-bikes. Not true. Not even close. In fact, he appreciates the access to cycling that they give many people, and how—undeniably—they are one less car on the road."

Stephen Jenner: "Interesting, Mike. I modified a Columbus SL frame to look more or less like your picture above, and I rode it a lot.

"I originally bought the bike complete. It had Campagnolo Nuevo chainset and derailleur. Millions of gears—if I remember correctly, three on the pedal end, and seven at the wheel, 21? And dropped handlebars.

"I started riding it to the office, about twelve miles each way. Unfortunately I had reason to brake sharply when a car emerged from the back of a red bus and the bike threw me over the handlebars.

"I got up, picked the bike up and started wheeling it back to the nearest phone kiosk. This was BM (before mobiles). My face was scraped and my arms were painful. I was in the kiosk struggling to make a call for help, and a little old lady opened the kiosk door and asked if I was OK. I said yes, and she said, 'no you are not,' and ushered me out, and then she dialed 999 for an ambulance, and myself and the bike were carted away to the nearest hozzie, where X-rays showed that I had two broken arms and a broken scaphoid in my left wrist.

"When I had recovered, I set about repairing the bike, and this time, I fitted a set of French handlebars, which made the bike look very similar to the one in your picture.

"I rode that bike for many years and then left it in my garage for a few more years, before some chap answered my advert and bought the thing for £40.... He got an absolute bargain.

"I still have a bike in the garage. This one is a Marin which I had given to my son when he was 15. He had fitted an electric motor and used it to commute to work, right up until he met a girl and made me and the wife grandparents.

"He now lives in Anglesey, where he is painstakingly restoring a catholic presbytery which stands on around two acres of land, some of which is immaculate, and some of which is still overgrown, and that bit furnishes him with penny buns (a.k.a. ceps). If I am around during the seasons when they are sprouting, I have a fried egg from one of his chickens, black pudding, and a fried cep, all for free; the ceps cost a fortune in London delis, and it is not possible to get a fresh egg, which lose their shape within a day....

"A really special 'full English'...in Wales."

Ed. note: A cep, from the French cèpes, is a porcini mushroom. A 'full English' means a full English breakfast. Anglesey is an island off the northwest coast of Wales with history going back to before the Romans.

Jim Kofron: "Ahh, I first heard about Rivendell on this website, at least a decade ago. And I was fascinated by their ethos, and was pretty sure that if I ever returned to cycling, I would look into their bikes. Sure enough, about four years ago I was ready for my midlife crisis vehicle—a Riv Platypus. Set up with friction shifters (the only kind of shifting I've ever known) and rim brakes (ditto), I rode it to Pilates this morning. It has a lovely front basket for rides to the grocery store. It's nice to live in an area where I feel safe enough to ride. The bike is a piece of usable art—it's beautiful, functional, and fun. And Rivendell does sell lycra (padded underwear)—but their logowear is mainly hats and T-shirts. It was a great article in The New Yorker, and I want to thank you again Mike, for introducing me to them....

Mike replies: I hate to say it but it was fully 15 years ago. Here's the original post about Gruesome. Note that the next post after that was "The Point of Sufficiency," which became mildly famous for a bit.

Comments

[Stan B.]

A true, old school analog dude, god bless 'em! Much respect- even if that saddle makes my butt hurt just looking at it...

Gave up the bike eight years ago, but I'll walk the camera till I drop. Never thought about getting rich monetarily, wouldn't mind being rich in images.

[Andrew]

I admire the casual approach to cycling or photography. But it should be about inclusiveness, not exclusivity.

Petersen worries about glorification of speed for being discouraging to entry-level riders, but he rags on ebikes for having a motor. Guess what? A motor makes a bike accessible for more riders on more routes.

I don't want an ebike myself, but I love seeing people riding them past me--people who probably wouldn't be on a bike without the assistance of a motor.

If he were truly focused on accessibility to entry-level riders, he would at least tolerate ebikes, if not embrace them wholeheartedly.

I think he may even believe that he cares mostly about accessibility, but I get the feeling that he's more driven by nostalgia and a certain sense of superiority that goes along with it.

All that said, I'm happy he's making unique bikes and selling them to people who are having a blast on them. But I'm just as happy for the passionate engineers who are making amazing mountain bikes for adventurers and road bikes for racers.

There's room for everyone if we make space for them!

[From the article: "He is less dogmatic about e-bikes than one might expect ('Better than a car')." --Mike]

[Craig]

Thanks for the link! I ride a Rivendell Appaloosa these days, built for me in 2021 by Grant's team in Walnut Creek. It's a wonderful bike. Its predecessor (which I still have) was an early '90s Bridgestone XO-3, which Grant designed before starting Rivendell in 1994.

Yes, the article is available to non-subscribers, though I see a banner at the bottom of the window reading "You are reading your last free article."

[Paul Bass]

That Trek is still a fine bike.
Find a LBS (Local Bike Shop) to fix it up for you, and ride it.

[Mike Marcus]

I have following you and Kirt and Thom for decades because you three give me new thoughts about gear, composition, and how it might help me make better photos. Yet I have never, or perhaps only once, considered photography as a way to make money. That once occurred in 1972 or 73 when I was offered a position as a part-time winter ranger at a Colorado state park, where bighorn sheep would winter. At that time I did consider becoming a "real" wildlife photographer, but at about the sametime I was offered a "real job" in NC. So, since I had spent years learning aquatic biology and ecology, I then decided to take the scientist job in NC and retired many years later in NM following that job path. But, during that time I maintained the joy of taking photos, which I started at age 12, continuing now to 77. My photos remind me of all the interesting things I have seen and beautiful places I have been. I now often share some of my photos on Facebook for friends there to see and maybe enjoy. I also have a couple of bicycles that only get ridden for good fun and exercise. For me, photography and bicycles have similar themes. And that continues to be good enough.

[Doug Vaughn]

That's one of the most enjoyable articles I've read in a long time. I'm all about quirky but cool people who want to take the road less traveled. I had never heard of Rivendell bikes but now wish I could have one. Unfortunately, I already own two bikes (my key to staying fit) that are already taking more room in the garage than my wife would prefer. I wish more companies would focus on quality rather than profit only and admire his notion that a company growing larger doesn't equate to getting better. Thank you for the link!

[Herman Krieger]

Combining photography with bicycling-
"Along the Riverbank Bike Path with a 'Bent and a Box"

https://hermankrieger.com/bikepath.htm

[Pierre Charbonneau]

Dear Mike,

I was glad to read few days ago the Grant Petersen story in The New Yorker. So this post does ring a lot for me. There is indeed a parallel to simplicity of bicycle practice and gear and photography.

After my 44 years as a fully equipped commercial/industrial photographer, I have turned my photo interest to the confortable use of a single Leica M body and two lenses.
35 and 50, if you ask, is all I need to photograph anything that I could wish for. Which are my family, my friends and some street scenes here and then.

As a young road cyclist racer on the local scene here in Quebec, I was riding on the fancy Italian bikes of the seventies. I have never stopped riding and go for 4000Km so far this year. Funny thing, after riding a while a carbon fiber bike, I have returned since eleven years to the simple classic steel frames. These are still made, often custom by artisans with Columbus SL tubing.

I have Grant Petersen' book "Just Ride". I have enjoyed it a lot and many of his opinions do make a lot sense to the amateur and accomplished rider.

I only disagree with Grant about racing cyclist clothing. The enthusiastic cyclist dressed as one may look a tiny bit intense to the casual one. But these pieces of special clothing are a blessing in the summer, as merino wool is in spring and fall.

[Gary Nylander]

Wow, thanks for posting this Mike! I think those bikes made by Rivendell Bicycle Works are works of art and look very practical. I couldn't read the article in The New Yorker because it was behind a paywall, but those articles are usually very good. I re-energized my interest in bicycles about two years ago, I had been helping my uncle before he passed away in online research because he wanted a second e-bike that was more compact and foldable for his Vancouver apartment. My research also piqued my interest in a bike for myself. I had an older mountain bike languishing way in my garage, it was actually in pretty good shape, but I didn't particularly like riding it.

An e-bike was out of my budget so I decided to stay with a regular pedal bike. I found pedalling my bike around my hilly Glenrosa neighbourhood is a great way to stay in shape physically. I have also been incorporating my bike riding into my photography, I have been thinking of ways to pare down the weight, less is more philosophy sometimes I head out with a 35mm film camera and a 50mm lens or my twin lens reflex, or often I use my iPhone 15. I also found a lightweight tripod, because I like photographing still life or landscape photos and like setting the camera up to study my composition. I very much enjoy the simplicity and freedom of cycling on my own leg power and finding different subjects to shoot as I ride my bike.

I also have a second pedal bike that I keep at my Mom's house on Vancouver Island, I received this from the same uncle who I was helping research e-bikes (he never did buy one). This bike is a vintage 1974 Peugeot "mixte" style of frame. I mentioned to my uncle one day that it would be nice to have a bike to ride when I visit the Island. He told me that he had this bike that was sitting in the crawl space of his home in Metchosin, it had been there for 35 years. So we pulled it out and I took it to a bike shop for new tires and a mechanical tune-up and I also cleaned it up as it had some rust here and there. It's a great bike to ride, I definitely like incorporating my photography with cycling.

I have been inspired by your Sigma FP camera and I'm looking at buying one of those cameras (probably the "L" model) with a Leica "M" adapter for some older lenses. With the camera, lenses and a lightweight tripod, it figured it would weigh about 2.54 kg (5.6 pounds) I would fit that into a medium-sized backpack and cycle around and see what I could find to photograph. Great fun!

[William Lewis]

Fun. Yeah, I try my best to keep that in my photography. My M 240 has always been about that for me.

Last couple of weeks though it's been an even slightly older but new to me Pentax K5 aps-c dslr with their HD DA 20-40mm Limited zoom. Small range right round normal, but lovely optically. "Only" 16mp but more than enough in the real world, and a gorgeously rendering sensor that I'm just having pure fun with. One seriously nice keeper so far: https://www.pentaxforums.com/forums/attachments/12-post-your-photos/645028d1727316499-landscape-early-morning-heavy-fog-p012.jpg

What more can we ask out of this game?

[Gary]

Good of you to mention Rivendell and Grant Petersen. Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter had Rivendells. I have one or two (or three) myself. Best there is, if you're not a racer, or a wannabe racer.

[Stephen Jenner]

Interesting Mike, I modified a Columbus SL frame
to look more or less like your picture above, and I rode it a lot.

I originally bought the bike complete, it had Campagnolo Nuevo chainset, deraillier. millions of gears, if I remember correctly three on the pedal end, and seven at the wheel, 21? and dropped handlebars.

I started riding it to the office, about twelve miles each way, unfortunately I had reason to brake sharply when a car emerged from the back of a red bus and the bike threw me over the handlebars.

I got up, picked the bike up and started wheeling it back to the nearest phone kiosk, this was BM (Before mobiles), my face was scraped and my arms were painful. I was in the kiosk struggling to make a call for help, and a little old lady opened the kiosk door and asked if I was OK, I said yes, and she said "no you are not", and ushered me out, and then she dialled 999 for an ambulance, and myself and the bike were carted away to the nearest hozzie, where x-rays showed that I had two broken arms and a broken scaphoid in my left wrist.

When I had recovered, I set about repairing the bike, and this time, I fitted a set of French handlebars, which made the bike look very similar to the one in your picture.

I rode that bike for many years and then left it in my garage for a few more years, before some chap answered my advert and bought the thing for £40... He got an absolute bargain.

I still have a bike in the garage, this one is a Marin which I had given to my son when he was 15. He had fitted an electric motor and used it to commute to work, right up until he met a girl and made me and the wiff grandparents.

He now lives in Anglesey, where he is painstakingly restoring a catholic presbytery which stands in around two acres of land, some of which is immaculate, and some of which is still overgrown, and that bit furnishes him with penny buns (aka Ceps), if I am around during the seasons when they are sprouting, I have a fried egg from one of his chickens, black pudding and a fried Cep, all for free, the ceps cost a fortune in London deli's, and it is not possible to get a fresh egg, which lose their shape within a day...

A really special "Full English"... in Wales.

[Sean]

I suppose most followers of TOP have had friends ask them for advice on what camera gear to buy, and many of us have responded with this question: What kind of subjects interest you? You wouldn’t advise someone with a growing interest in birds to buy an 11-22mm lens.

It’s the same with cycling.

Before you buy a bike, decide what kind of cycling you want or need to do. Are you commuting in northern Europe in traffic during the winter? Are you riding around a flat town in LA to meet friends for a Flat White? Those contrasting cyclists need different bikes and different clothing. Those who want to ride 100K over hilly terrain would be foolish to tackle long climbs featuring 20% gradients whilst looking like they’ve just ridden off the set of E.T. If they do, they’ll find out their bike can’t fly, checked cotton doesn’t wick sweat, and they need to phone home.

The truth is that many bikes share the same fate. They end up in a shed or on eBay. Fair-weather commuters return to their cars when winter strikes; fixies end up as ornaments on apartment walls; the lycra-clad guy never gets fit enough for those climbs.

The road to the shed begins with poor initial choices or bad advice, like the Stuckist dude in the article with his faux keeping-it-simple aesthetic. The 80s are not coming back; bikes are not wooden chairs; design improvements are possible. It’s no better when a Mamil (middle-aged man in Lycra) tells you he bought his ultra-lightweight $17,000 Trek Madone because it’s all about marginal gains—the guy weighs 200 lbs. Those two dudes might appear to be at opposite ends of the spectrum, but they have something in common: There’s nothing casual about them.

But hey, there’s a place for us all on the road. There’s safety in numbers.

[Nigli]

There's a fair bit of interesting monochrome photographyon the various Rivendell blogs taken by Petersen. If you like bikes.

[DB]

Gruesome is a fine name for a bike.

Reminds me of Tyrone Power’s airplane called The Geek. (Watch Nightmare Alley if you’re unsure what that’s about.)

[James Weekes]

We have a small apartment in a hill town in Provence. It is way up a hill from the valley floor and you can continue uphill to the top of the range. E-bikes have been a blessing for avid local bikers who have aged out of hill climbs but still love being on a bike. These are mostly fit people in their mid-seventies and up. They only use the boost while climbing and pedal themselves on level ground and downhill.

[robert e]

Thanks for the reminder.

"To take a photograph is to align the head, the eye and the heart. It's a way of life." -- Henri Cartier-Bresson

That popular quotation may sound heavy to some, but it's also light, even liberating. It's about photography as engagement and expression, an interaction. It's certainly not about making money, or gear, or exhibiting or creating a body of work.

[David Blankenhorn]

For this dedicated bicylist the best thing to say about e-bikes is that mine allows me to go at speeds that rival commuting by automobile. At high e-boost and max effort by moi. Also allows me to carry loads that I’d normally have to use an automobile for.Think 40lbs grocries. Albeit at a far lower speed than unladen. :-))
I have been meaning for some time to “analog bicycle” over to Rivendell some Saturday and meet Mssr. Peterson. Ostensibly re finding obscure parts for my older bicycles. Fwiw, I am a retired, onetime pro, “analog” photgrapher.

[Kirk W.]

Apparently I had one more free article left! I’m with Peterson in spirit but it’s hard to scratch the cycling itch with just one bike. Going fast, peaceful cruiser rides, and everything in between has led me to a garage full of bikes. Though if I had to keep just one, it would be the old mountain bike from the era of the Bridgestone MB-1 that he mentioned with the last of the high-end friction shifters. It is a lot like breaking out a film camera from the 80’s! Much like cameras, it’s hard to stick with just one and ignore the march of progress.

I agree with Andrew’s final point, get on your bikes and ride!

[David]

Over a large fraction of my life, I have been involved in bicycling and photography, with my interests in both waxing and waning in multi-year cycles. For the last few years, cycling has been waxing and photography waning, but, neither interest ever seems to fade away completely.

In both realms, my tastes run towards the old and craftsy: black and white film and steel bicycles. This makes me a natural for Rivendell (where Grant and a large fraction of the staff are film photographers), and I enjoyed a visit to their shop about a year ago. I'm not sure, but I think that I first heard of Rivendell on the Online Photographer!

But, my tastes run a bit more modern than Rivendell's: I like disk brakes and I sometimes wear lycra! Still, I think that it is great that he is able to sell beautiful and practical bikes that stand out from most of what is on offer from the major companies, and I hope that the New Yorker article brings him satisfaction and some new customers!

David

[David]

One other comment regarding bicycling vis-a-vis photography: If only there was a bicycling blog that was nearly as good as the Online Photographer . . .
David

[James Bullard]

About a month ago I bought an ebike because I am verging on 80 (November) and I haven't been able to pedal up the hills around here for the last two years. It's like having a tailwind on demand and I once again enjoy riding. I've already ridden it over 500 miles. I take a camera a lot of the time. I always have my phone of course, which has a very good camera plus an app (Map My Fitness) to track my progress (miles, calories burned) and I regard my photos as being the equivalent of Scrooge McDuck's money bin, something I can wallow in when I can't be 'out there'.

[psu]

When I was much younger less well established economically (probably in the mid 90s) I visited the then also much younger and less well established Rivendell Bikes when I had a business trip out to the Bay Area for something or other. I rode a metallic blue Rivendell Road bike with old shifters, pretty lugs on its steel frame and all that and told Grant that if the startup that I was working for hit then I'd come back and see him about buying one.

That startup never hit, and by the time I could go see him about a Road bike Rivendell had stopped doing the straight up road bikes except as custom jobs that you'd have to wait months or years for. So I never got that pretty blue bike either.

I have eventually joined the population of self-indulgent racer wanabees riding carbon fiber road bikes relatively slowly. They do the job very well and without me needing to think about it too much. A lot like an iPhone.

I also have a steel frame with modern parts machine too that is almost as nice. Kind of like an older DSLR, or a modern automatic film camera loaded with Tri-X. 🙂

[Dan D]

I worked with Grant when I was updating my 1972 Fuji Finest in the early Oughts. Bought the tan B17 seat, Shimano bar end shifters and brakes, Nitto comfort road bike handlebars and a number of other parts. Grant was very helpful and knew my bike (one of the last fully chrome bikes). I used to look forward to his publications he put out when they were printed.

I don't always agree with his theories such as less air in the tires makes no difference in rolling resistance, but like any hobby... opinions.

Like you the Fuji sits in the garage as I prefer my twenty year old Litespeed Classic.

[tom]

As a longime bicyclist I appreciate older style bikes, and I have a garage full of my older steel bikes that I still ride. But I also like my modern bikes that allow me to fly faster and further.
Half the fun of biking is going fast, and each new generation of bikes seems to do fast better.
I haven't bought an e-bike yet. But I am sure that age will catch up to me someday and an e-bike will be nice then.

P.s. tight-fit lycra shorts are comfortable. Loose shorts are very uncomfortable because they bunch up, create friction. Why anyone would ride for a long duration in loose shorts is beyond my comprehension…

[Bob G.]

I’ll have to agree that there’s similar ethos in cycling and photography, having pursued both for several decades. You can’t just have one either. Always room for customizing equipment in both pursuits. Blend both and you’ll sometimes get the shots that you would whizz by in the car. I can’t count the number of times I couldn’t even find a spot to pull over my car for a picture. With a bike, I can pretty much always stop and select several angles whenever I need. One can carry just about any gear with the right equipment too. With this mode of travel, one is more efficient and ecologically sound than any other.

[Guy]

@David: do you know "In the know cycling"
not exactly a blog but Steve is neutral and competent in his reviews of bike gear
Give it a try