Dan Nelken is a visual artist, documentary storyteller, educator, and lecturer based in New York City. He specializes in portrait-based photography that offers a window into communities that often exist outside of the cultural mainstream.
Nelken’s photographs of the Hells Angels were part of one of his long-term projects in the early 1970s. He showed the work to photographer Cornell Capa (along with another project he had been developing which featured a disabled woman he knew), and Capa offered the artist his first solo show which was mounted at the Neikrug Gallery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan (one of the few photo galleries then operating in New York). The opening reception was quite a scene with many members of the Hells Angels in attendance, which was covered by the Channel 5 News crew.