Enrique Parrilla
Blink and you’ll miss the shot, but with our latest Chasing the Ride highlight, Yve Assad; she shoots between the blink and the shot.
A journey in one day
As plan my route from Murphy, NC to Nashville, TN for a day trip – I already know, it’s going to be a solid day on 2 wheels (600 miles roundtrip).
Starting the route through truly one of the prettiest canyons, Ocoee through highway 64, I get to enjoy this scenery before I hope on the I-75. It’s not long after on I-75 that I pass Chattanooga to hop on I-24 straight North, the longest stretch on this journey. A few hours in, I am greeted with the bustling city of Nashville, TN, and its wonderful traffic.. Thankfully this is the only portion I hit heavy traffic, I forget nowadays just what city traffic is other than deer, chickens, or guinea fowl crossing the roads.
Nashville, TN, and beyond
Riding just a few more miles northbound in the outskirts of Nashville, I reach her beautiful property where I get to have a 1 on 1 to chat about her career.
Let’s dive into her amazing work and get to know Yve Assad, as a great photographer but also as a great motorcycle rider from our community.
A picture is worth a thousand words
Her Career expands over 15 years inspired by her passion for photojournalism, so much so that she got a job after college as a staff photographer for a newspaper. This experience led her to expand her creativeness and, at this point, she started to do more freelance work to fuel her inspiration.
You meet the nicest people on motorcycles
Not much later she was introduced to the work of Danny Lyon and his book “The Bikeriders”. This subculture of rebel 60’s motorcyclist that Danny Lyon captured further her love for photography and motorcyclist and married both.
Inspiration and admiration
I personally discovered her work years ago in her amazing flat-track racing photos, she had a way to capture a split second and tell a whole story within that brief moment. Her work has inspired my work in many ways and when we finally got a chance to meet for the first time, I believe at Barber Vintage Festival 2015, I had to let her know how much I admired her work. If there is one thing to be said about social media, it brings a lot of talent and connects people from far and wide.
Come take a journey with us. Make sure to like and subscribe to our YouTube Channel and follow her amazing creative work, you won’t regret it, I promise.
Until the next city, catch you somewhere on the road of life.
Enrique is a creative originally born and raised in the Mile High City of Denver, CO but in 2021 he skipped town to the rolling hills of North Carolina for a quieter kind of life. He specializes in visual storytelling and finding a voice for a narrative. With over 15 years experience in the industry, he brings professionalism along with experience to every project.
Find him on Instagram or see his work here.
Video Transcript:
Hi, I’m Yve Assad, I’m a photographer based in Nashville, Tennessee. I’ve been a photographer for about 15 years now. I specialize in lifestyle and automotive work, but I like to shoot everything from landscapes and people, documentary work, kind of everything.
I started shooting motorcycles. I went to photojournalism school, and I discovered Danny Lyon’s work and was really just enamored with everything that I saw that he did with outlaws.
The book called The Bikeriders was just a big influence on me, and so as a photojournalism student, I said I wanted to photograph motorcycles too, and I basically found some bikers and some biker bars and some events and started shooting them, and just sort of led into a lifelong interest in the motorcycle culture, and of course, I ride, and so it was an easy subject for me.
This is a Ducati Hypermotard that I enjoy riding. My main baby is out of commission right now, a 1976 BMW R90/6. She needs some fixing up, but I’ve been riding this. She’s great and good times. A little faster than the BMW.
In 2014, I took a month-long trip from Nashville to Nova Scotia, and I think it was about 5,000 miles there and back, and I went through New England and Quebec and through Nova Scotia and back through Maine and kind of home, but that was pretty amazing, and it was a solo ride on my 1976 BMW, which did wonderfully, and it was really special.
I think as a woman, I mean I have always grown up around guys, been kind of a tomboy myself, so working in a primarily men’s world/man’s world hasn’t been hard for me. I think that most of the men that I’ve encountered have been really supportive and I’m so very thankful for that.
I think it can be intimidating, but if you’re a woman and you want to get into sort of a more masculine type of subject of photography or video or anything like that, don’t be afraid and just go for it. I think that your work will speak for itself, and people don’t have to know that you’re a man or a woman, but if you just be proud that you are who you are.
Any advice I would give to somebody aspiring to get into motorcycle photography, or any type of photography, is just to shoot what you love and really don’t try to put yourself in a box of what other people might think you need to be or what that might look like for other people and what they feel like is correct. I think just shoot the things that really get you fired up and get you excited about the subject or the culture, the subculture.
All those things, I think, going back to our flat track days, it’s like we weren’t making any money at all, and time’s are hard. We ate a lot of peanut butter and jellies, and I wouldn’t take that back for anything. I mean working at newspapers, it’s like, all those things I did because I loved it, and it just kept my heart full.
So yeah, I think, just making sure you remember that at the end of the day.
You can find my work on my website or on Instagram.