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  David Riker was born in Boston. At the age of six, his family moved to Brussels where he attended a French-speaking school. When he was 10 years old, his family moved to London where he studied at The American School. At 13, Riker began taking pictures and fell in love with the camera. He was hired as a photographer at the weekly newspaper, The American, and at age 17, won the photography award at his school. Growing up as an outsider in London, Riker was deeply affected by the immigrant life of the city, living and working with the Caribbean, Irish and South Asian communities. Riker moved back to the States in 1981 to study at Tufts University where he became a student activist, and it was at this time that he started his first documentary photographic project. Inspired by such socially committed photographers as Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, Riker photographed the antinuclear movement around the world. He photographed demonstrations at military bases, the women's peace camp at Greenham Common in England, and the historic march on the United Nations, and he took portraits of people involved in the movement including Japanese survivors of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Riker had originally hoped to work in a large photo agency, but at age 21, he changed his creative focus. "I didn't know any of the people in my pictures, certainly not well," Riker explains. "I had always wanted my pictures to be truthful, but I now realized that I needed my subjects to speak, to have the chance to contradict what the viewer might think is going on. This was a very painful moment for me. I put down my still camera and decided to learn filmmaking." In 1988, Riker directed his first documentary, THE MANY FACES OF PAPER - a 30-minute short examining a 16-month strike in a Maine paper mill community. The film was made with the active collaboration of striking families. During the shooting of Riker's second documentary, ROXBURY, USA (1990), which explored one community's struggle to recover from addiction, Riker offered production training to some of the neighborhood's recovering addicts so they could help him make the movie. Wanting to take his approach of community filmmaking one step further, Riker enrolled in New York University's Graduate Film School where, in 1992, he made his first fictional film, THE CITY (which became "The Puppeteer" story). The short received critical acclaim and, among other accolades, won the Gold Medal for Dramatic Film at the Student Academy Awards and the Student Film Award from the Director's Guild of America. Riker is currently in development on two projects. The first is a remake of the classic 1953 film SALT OF THE EARTH, produced by Esparza/Katz and Echo Lake Productions in Los Angeles. The second project, entitled BORDER LIVES, is currently in the writing stage after nearly a year and a half of research along the U.S.-Mexico border; the film will examine the unique cultural life of the border. |
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