This is British Cycling’s Team Breeze. We all know about the gold-medal winning antics of Laura Trott, Jason Kenny and Joanna Rowsell, but this elite team have the far more important job of getting ordinary women throughout the UK on their bikes.
It was back in September 2015 I was asked by British Cycling to produce a set of images for its Breeze programme. Breeze is a network of over a 1,000 female volunteers who organise hundreds of relaxed, social and fun bike rides throughout the country, every week. I needed to produce a set of images that would, according to the brief, “challenge perceptions and break down barriers to participation, by removing fear of judgment and encouraging women to embrace the endorphins.”
In October 2015 a studio in Manchester was booked to photograph 11 Breeze champions and what an amazing group of women they were. Photographing large groups can often be a challenge – getting 11 people engaged with the camera at the exact 1/125th of a second you press the shutter is tricky. But no such problem with Team Breeze. All of them were so into what we were doing and so excited by the process that my job was, pardon me, a breeze. Check out this behind-the-scenes video on YouTube.
And this is what happened when the campaign image was show to the women.
Want to find out more about Team Breeze, click here.