What was slightly unusual for me about visiting Crisp Titanium to photograph the process and try and understand the man behind it, was that usually I visit the cycling industry and often become friends as a result. With Darren, we were friends long before the call and opportunity came to photograph his workshop deep in the Tuscan hills I once knew so well but hadn’t re-visited for decades.
What was more usual was that I was in Italy, became ill and both photographed a cycle frame building master while barely able to stand up and hold a camera, and worse, hand delivered a bad cold to his family at their home. This has become a bit of a pattern if I’m honest, character trait even. But that’s for another time.
There was a break in between two jobs in Italy, where I found myself with a blank canvas, a car, a bag of cameras and a yearning to re-visit the blissful first memories of travelling across Europe in the back of a old Citroen as the child of an architectural professor on search and create missions. Tuscany was where we’d stayed for the entire summers of 1984 and 1985, and town names like Montepulciano, Pienza and San Giminiano were etched into my tapestry as much as the south west London street names I grew up on.
But I hadn’t as yet returned to those Tuscan remembered hills and now there was an American friend making bicycles out of titanium in backdrop of my childhood haunts so it seemed the right time to re-visit and I pulled out of Vicenza and headed west before the turn south back to my memories.
I found Darren’s idyllic home workshop high above villages of perhaps one the most evocative landscapes in Europe. This was deep into the playground of generations of affluent British, with the beautiful untouched villages, the communal dining and naturally the wine. The familiar painting like vistas with that unique light that draws artists and photographers alike now homed American titanium, and of course the naturally warm, generous and sensitive welcome of an Italian greeting. Even to a sick visitor.
Darren’s wife Sorana made us a beautiful pasta dish and set me up in an apartment along side the workshop while their girls were busy showing me their pet cat sat comfortably in a child’s push chair for it’s evening promenade. I don’t remember much of that night other than having the deepest sleep for a while. But I remember thinking the answer for long weeks on the road, living out of a bag and the nightly procedure of finding food and eating in a hotel room while downloading and backing up images was clearly a friendly home from home to break the cycle at least once a work trip.
The following morning I was sat in the workshop – spacious, modern, stylish and with the generous warmth and amiable aroma of a wood burner like a welcome friend in the middle of the room. Darren sat opposite me in the foyer that doubled as a gallery of previous welded achievement, under striking rusted steel lamp shades that complemented the feel of design paid attention to through the tasteful renovation of these elegant buildings. To have a workshop is a goal for many, to have an elegant and homely one, well that’s dreamy. As we sat and discussed whether our first meeting was at a Campagnolo birthday party years before or another Campagnolo get together at a wedding not long after, we discussed the importance of lighting and he explained he made the lampshades above him. His architectural past crept out as he spoke, like a design vapour of a different colour, but one with a similar depth to the that of the cycling history I recognised. As architecture filtered in and out of our morning’s conversations I realised the calling of Tuscany this time had been pivotal to me photographically, no matter how groggy it also felt. I remember it was at this point, sitting in his home that I decided I would continue to rekindle my love of making portraits that had been overlooked or perhaps forgotten for a years. I thought I’d tail back the usual welding, filing, aligning photographs for this impromptu factory visit, and instead aim to just make a portrait of this master of metal, my friend Darren Mark Crisp – A man of good taste that happens to hand make the most beautiful titanium bicycles.
Primarily known for his high end road bike frames, DMC was building a more off road centric drop barred bike the day I delivered him the flu. It was to be his own personal steed. He had built off road machines for people before but crafting your art on a present to yourself must be a pretty good feeling to a cyclist. In between customer orders it started to take shape as an elegant machine with understated detail and naturally, a good weld etiquette. I’ve long been a titanium cyclist with a Fat Chance, IF, Merlin, Litespeed, Moots and Kish history but thoughts have since drifted to Tuscany when remembering the blueprints of his personal statement on the workbench together with the unspoken weld signature of that day.
Watching him work as I did that afternoon from the relative arm’s distance of the other end of some long glass, the thing that was subtly apparent was his love of the bicycle. There was a calmness and contentment from his aura, a quiet confidence about his purpose here in this kitchen of sorts with these exclusive ingredients of refined metal. A quiet and un-egotistical awareness of ability, a subtle confidence not unlike his silver screen lookalike Eric Stoltz. A sensitive, talented and likeable frame builder and friend alike, our talk drifted across cycling and into other cultures. Our mutual friends within this two wheeled family popped up periodically for cameo appearances. His long term friend legendary frame builder and former sitter for my preference to make portrait, Dario Pegoretti opened up a knowing similar perspective we had on many viewpoints. Like our architectural connections we also seemed to possess similar cycling aesthetics. My friendship with extended family Moots over in Colorado sparked up an explanation of that weld etiquette. I suppose I had always assumed welding was welding. I understood that my old Merlin MTB had double pass welds and had learned what that actually meant, but I suppose the thought that some might consider a weld might be like a signature on a tubed creation was interesting now. Darren said that he would hang out with Pegoretti in his workshop, welding a little and discussing his technique, welding machine programming and his weld sequence. I pretended in a small way that this was like my hanging out in a mentor’s darkroom printing with them and just being able to watch their personal handmade take on turning a tiny negative into an enormous print. The differences between lenses, papers, chemicals, time allowed and taken away, type of dryer used and all the stuff that can affect the outcome after the original exposure had been made. It was likely nothing like welding a titanium frame, but I took comfort in the imagined connection. The fact that Darren explained he would sometimes study occasional parts or framesets from different marques including my extended titanium family Moots and see them as books, reading areas like weld stop/ starts and sequences, temperature or penetration like turning pages on new but familiar chapters. Even though I had no idea on the subject I found myself relating to the gist of it all in a photographic sense, or rather actually just a sense of taking the right time to hand work something to make it as good as it can be made, titanium bicycle frame and fibre based photographic print alike.
Occasionally I find myself in an engine room of the cycling industry that is so comfortable to me that despite the noise, the aggression of the machinery or the logistical photographic difficulties, I feel I could just stay and soak up the ambience created by the master of the operation – the wizard of Oz behind the curtain. Pegoretti’s felt like this. And Demon Frameworks. As now did Crisp Titanium too.
My journey back north a couple of days later after I embarked on a childhood nostaligia tour was to take another turn as I drove into a flash blizzard in the accidentally downgraded, barely roadworthy, non-quattro rental car. A 4×4 would have meant a more secure journey over the Appenine mountains than the eerily empty motorway I crawled along on a two wheel drive with bald front tyres. Like something from a post armageddon movie I motored on alone for hours at a steady and slow pace thinking the motorway must have been closed until I finally arrived at my next destination late into the night.
I felt a little fraudulent driving away from Crisp Titanium with more photographs of Crisp than the titanium, but in some ways that Tuscan raid was a significant road trip for me. It was intended to trigger memories of formative life experience, and did in some ways after walking around some of those famous hill towns before an unlikely chance meeting with some former UK neighbours and friends that were now living nearby which naturally led to a cup of tea and another impromptu portrait made at their house. This visit to a small but promenant vein in the heart of cycling had inadvertently re-ignited an old conversation with my ways of seeing – the portrait. Something that is as much a part of who I am as the scar on my knee from the bike crash I had in those tuscan hills all those years ago.