Abstract: This presentation explores that landscape between the research imagination and practice as well as a concomitant transition in the sociologist's felt identity. Specifically, it describes the larger effect of building a persona for fieldwork on the self of the ethnographer. The work begins with an examination of the motives behind a proposed study of a deviant counterculture and the efforts that went into crafting a presentation of self appropriate for the milieu. It then offers a detailed analysis of how outlaw motorcycle clubs are depicted as well as how they represent themselves in popular culture and social media. Specifically, it examines iconic images of bikers and motorcycle gangs going back to their earliest cinematic representations up through recent television programs like Sons of Anarchy and True Detective. This fictionalization is juxtaposed with the self-generated images that the bikers and their clubs post on their official websites. Finally, both of these narratives are considered in relation to the ironies of how these clubs function in reality.